The Night Before........

Well, Good Evening, Good Morning or Good Afternoon, as this email flies around the world. After a week of waiting, a second MRI, two meetings with Dr. Stieg, it is now just a few hours away. My parents and brother and I are all down in Manhattan. Today was fairly hectic and stressful. As many of you can imagine, dealing with health insurance is always a lot of fun, but in the end, problem solved.

For those of you who know me well and know how much I love New York City, its pretty damn nice to be in Manhattan and staring out at the skyline and the sunset. No big plan for tonight except to have a low-key dinner and some wine – which we all need at the moment. Afterwards, I know T.J. is looking forward to shaving my head and ‘Bicing’ it.

So the Big Day, etc.
The schedule remains the same: Wednesday, September 17 – At Columbia Presbyterian at 05:30 for pre-op; Surgery begins at 07:30 and will be c. 5 hours; the remainder of the day and the evening in the ICU. The full name of the procedure I am having is a ‘Right Fronto-Temporal Craniotomy for Tumor Excision with Brainlab Navigation’.

For those of you who may want to swing by, my brother will probably put the visiting hours up on the blog later tomorrow. Preliminarily, it looks like they could be 11AM to 8PM, BUT, it could vary, so again, my brother will post. The hospital is located on East 68th Street and York Avenue and I believe I will be in the ‘Greenburg’ Wing.

Obviously the past 12 days or so have been a whirlwind and have flashed by. If anything, I have realized so much continues to happen – a major investment bank declares bankruptcy, another firm gets bought by a commercial bank and one of the largest insurance firms in the world teeters on the brink. Truly historic times. The world continues to go on and many of you have been affected by these events and others.

So many of you have emailed me, called me, checked the blog and so forth. If I have not personally gotten back to you, I apologize, but I promise you I will do that – AFTER they crack my head open though. I am not the most religious person, though I did go to Catholic school all my life (except college!), but if at any time I have thought of something ‘up there’ it has been now.

So many people have said to me ‘You are holding up so well’, or ‘Keep up the humor’, but as most of you that know me, that is me. Sarcastic, humorous and so forth. I appreciate everything you have done, and again, I would love to write a personalized email to each of you, but that will have to wait.

So again, thank you (for one of you in particular, I know I say ‘so’ a lot!). Check the Blog (http://michaelwhyte.blogspot.com/) for updates and/or call my brother T.J. (+1.203.521.7442). And forward this as appropriate. The family will be ‘living’ in the City over the next several days. I will be thinking of you all tomorrow – please do the same for me.

Mike

And of course, I have to mention that my UConn Huskies are 3-0 in football (yes, for those of you in Europe, American football!)