turning point

It’s 7/30, penultimate July, tigers about to exit; this is a lightly edited version of e-mail under header turning point, sent this morning to family and caregivers. I’ve been telling you that recently I’ve felt (and appeared to be) in as good shape, physically and medically, as I’ve been in years. Implied in that statement is that it will come to an end. We are now in the end times: I still feel great, and look great, and perform well at all the things I can still do, but my kidneys are in dire trouble — repeated testing tells me so — and my nephrologist (Luis Alvarez) has called in the big guns: large doses of prednisone, which are known to work well for me, except that there’s some threshold at which they make me very seriously crazy (not a clinical description, but it gives you the right flavor). The point is that there’s a good chance of arresting the damage and actually improving the situation. The longer-range trajectory is of course down; no one lives forever. I am,…