PART 5: BLACK HEART - WHITE SANDS - BLACK TRIANGLES
I got married in the early 90s, having finally found a woman who didn't mind my eccentricities and we were compatible in the ways that we both were creatives. She was an artist who worked at the same newspaper I did. We hit it off, got hitched and suddenly I went from being a single male geek to being a husband and a step-father.
Yes- she had a 10 year old daughter who thought I was funny and I thought she was pretty great too, but I soon realized I was out of my depth when it came to raising a pre-teen girl. Once we got married, the newspaper gave us a choice. One of us had to leave due to a nepotism policy. Since I had proven I could make money free-lancing and my wife was just starting her career at the newspaper, I became a house husband.
And I totally sucked at it.
By the time my step-daughter was 15 she absolutely hated my guts, and she had the right to.
I also didn't know it at the time but I was very sick. It came on gradually and would take several years to diagnose what was wrong with me. I had extreme mood swings, hot tempered - irrational, sometimes I was hyperactive and then sometimes I'd sleep for days. When I couldn't sleep, I would stay awake and suffer from intense migraines, chest pains and was pretty close to suicidal. Unfortunately since I was the one at home, my step daughter bore the brunt of my (unknown to me then) internal malady, manifested mentally. Just what you need when you are teenage girl, a mentally unstable step-father.
Both my wife and my stepdaughter thought I had gone just bat-shit crazy. I was constantly ending up in the emergency room feeling like I was having a heart attack. Each time they couldn't find anything physically wrong with me. One doctor diagnosed me as being manic/depressive. His idea to fix me was to fill me with pills. Nothing worked and in fact it got worse. I couldn't write, photograph and felt like hammered shit most of the time. At my lowest point really felt like checking out.
But just when you think you've hit rock bottom, one day the real bottom falls out of your life. As bad as I was feeling, my mother was feeling worse.
Almost every Sunday I would take my mom to the movies. It was a given. Didn't matter what was playing, we watched it. It became our thing to do, ever since we saw Close Encounters of the Third Kind. Come rain or shine, feeling shitty or not, a movie always let us escape from our lives even if just for a few hours.
Then shortly after I was married she started cancelling. At first I thought it was because I had my own family and she didn't want to be thought of as a clingy mom, but I was wrong. It took some prying to get it out of her but she finally told me it was because she hadn't been feeling very well for a long time.
I tried talking her into seeing a doctor, but she wouldn't. My mom was the kind who wouldn't go see a doctor if her arm had fallen off. She'd just rub some dirt on it and carry on without complaint.
Then one day she did something completely out of the ordinary for her. She called me and asked me to take her to the emergency room. She explained she had this deep burning in her lower abdomen for a long time and it was becoming more than even my tough as nails mother could bear. I didn't know it at the time but she had also been contemplating suicide. She had been in tremendous pain for many years and hid it way too well. I had noticed she had lost weight, but she said she was dieting. My mother was always dieting, ever since her husband (my father) called her "fatty." Special shout-out to dear old dad for giving my mother an eating disorder.
After she had taken blood tests they X-rayed her and ran her through the CT scanner. When the attending physician came out to talk to me. His face was white. I knew it wasn't good news.
He explained to me my mother was riddled with cancer. It had probably started in her lower abdomen and had more than likely caused by the Endometriosis she had when she was a young mother.
I remember her telling me about the operation she had when she was in her early 30s. She said they literally had to scrape the endometriosis that was growing on her intestines and put them back in.
Tests showed the cancer had spread to her kidneys, liver and her brain.
Her oncologist told me she must have had the cancer for more than 5 years. He also said she must have been hiding terrific pain. He leveled with me and said at most she probably had a year to live, maybe more but only if she started radical chemotherapy and radiation as soon as possible.
They never got a chance to.
Twenty one days later I buried my beloved mother. I haven't recovered and probably never will. I think of her everyday and always will.
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A year later I was still going through my own thing and again I found myself in the emergency room, coincidentally the same E.R. my mother had been diagnosed in. The same doctor suggested an X-Ray and a CT scan something no other doctor had thought to do. To say I was nervous was an understatement. Still, as depressed as I was I didn't really care one way or the other. I didn't want to die, I just wanted it all to be over.
After X-rays and blood tests the doctor came in and told my wife and myself the prognosis. I had a huge mass on the base of my throat. He told her it was most likely thyroid cancer.
The mass had dropped below my sternum and was sitting just above my heart causing me pain. It was also probably the underlying cause of my manic/depression and a host of other mental symptoms.
He told her about thyroid storms and that is why I was sometimes become super-hyper-man followed by the inevitable crash and depression of hypothyroidism. My body was on a roller coaster ride of hormones that I couldn't sense or control. All this time, all those pills and therapies - it had been misdiagnosed as a mental illness.
To make a long story short (and after another few hundred tests) needle-biopsies and 3D imaging of the tumor, the doctors had devised a plan to remove the mass.
They figured the surgery would last an hour and a half - two tops. It would have to be removed in a way as to not spread the cancer or damage the parathyroid glands. They scheduled the surgery which involved taking biopsies of the removed tissue and examining it under a microscope to see if it had spread.
In reality it was a much more complicated than they had thought and I was on the table for almost 5 hours. At one point I even woke during the surgery but they put me right back under. At another point my wife thought I must have died on the table. Despite everything, the surgery went well and the prognosis was good.
To make a long story short (and to my great surprise) I survived. The cancer had not spread and a benign tumor surrounding the cancer had stopped it from metastasizing. Now my thyroid hormones come in pill form every morning. Every six months my blood is checked to see if the cancer returned. It has not and they don't expect it plus it has been almost 30 years.
In less than a year I was my old geeky self again with my thyroid levels balanced, but I was still mourning the loss of my mother and probably always will.
I patched things up with my step-daughter and today she's one of my best and closest friends. She tells me the changes she saw in me were nothing short of miraculous.
Interesting side note, when the tumor was biopsied it showed I had a rare form of cancer that only shows up in people who lived close to nuclear test sites.
The doctor asked me if I lived in Nevada in my youth. We did, for a time we lived in Elko, Nevada and Bountiful Utah, both states being immediately down-wind of the Nevada Test Site.
Thyroid cancers like mine are practically as common as crows there, so common they even have a term for it - Downwinders syndrome. The doctor suggested my siblings should have their thyroids checked as well. They found the exact same cancer in my sister. She survived her surgery as well but I lost her early this year to renal failure. I miss her beyond measure too.
My sister at 16 playing Bonnie Parker
One good thing about recovering from major surgery is it gave me tons of time to get my radio geek back on and log thousands of active civil and military aviation frequencies. I also began building my dream radio room and added dozens of new high-tech scanning receivers.
I had made a name for myself writing for three radio communications hobbyist magazines and as a result I was commissioned by Universal Radio to write a book The Comprehensive Guide To Military Monitoring, which not only came with a healthy advance but also a major perk, radio communications gear manufacturers were sending me free cutting-edge gear for me to review. I was in scanner-geek heaven.
The book was a best seller among the Interceptors and helped pay the bills for many years plus giving me the freedom to get back to my Interceptor Project in ways that I could never have imagined. Technology had finally caught up with my vision giving me the ability to monitor the airwaves on a scale that wasn't possible before.
The new monitoring system paid off in other ways as well. I started my own business called, The Reporter's Edge - a professional news tip service.
Every TV station (and even the newspaper I used to work for) paid me decent money to do what I was already doing for free, keeping my ears to the scanners. I made sure they knew about every breaking news event happening in our area. Since I was also good at breaking national news, I even had several networks paying me a monthly retainer to apprise them of anything I might monitor that would be of national interest. News directors kept my phone number on speed dial, and their conversations would start with "What are you hearing?" or "What do you know?"
But as much as I loved my new self made civilian intelligence agency, there were times where I felt I had strayed off course and needed to get back to what I had envisioned so many years ago.
It was time for less shoe-gazing and much more sky gazing. I had also become so connected that I had to disconnect.
When I wasn't photographing, I'd go to the truck and search the military air bands for active frequencies and believe me there were plenty. It was so cool to hear the fighters and bombers going into the White Sands Missile Range just over the mountains to the immediate west. My go-to gadget for finding the active channel was an on loan Yaesu/Standard AX 700 which had a built in radio spectrum analyzer. It made it so easy to capture everything including cell phone conversations which were not encrypted or illegal to monitor at the time.
If you have a good pair of binoculars you can just make it out especially at night when they are readying the radars but when they put the secret aircraft on a pole and raise them up to be tested it's lights out to keep prying eyes or passing imaging satellite from seeing what they are testing. More on what goes on in the White Sands Missile Range in another post. 
Every year Roving Sands would have a pubic outreach event and citizens were allowed inside the fence to meet the servicemen and look at their machines close-up. Many of the pilots recognize me as being the guy at the fence and they would talk to me. I made sure I had a stack of my best still photos fresh from the drugstore to hand out. It was a great way to make contacts. I told them who I was, who I wrote for and what all the radios were for. Most were surprised their communications were that easy to monitor. Some wanted to know what equipment to buy so they could do it at home one they had left the military. I made friendships that last to this day.
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