The real residue...

I'm mending.

All is not perfect, but most is not bad, and that is good.

The real residue from this little medical adventure of mine is not having to cut back on driving, spicy foods or beer, or having to take some meds for six months or more.

The real residue is less medical, and mostly psychological.

The real residue is uncertainty.

In my mind, I know that this all will be fixed. But, in my mind, I also will have lingering doubts.

When driving at 80, me at the wheel with Joyce beside me, heading to K.C. or across the salt flats of Utah or the mountains of North Carolina, invading my thoughts will be doubts -- that uncertain feeling that I am 100 percent OK and what if a seizure hits. Or even when driving to school in the morning, that bit of uncertainty will creep into my mind and grab my attention, for a second or a minute or more. (And what if I hurt someone if something does happen?)

Or when trying to reclimb Mt. Kilimanjaro. Or in a compartment watching the wastelands whiz by on the trans-Siberian Railway, a thousand miles from nowhere. Or, our first bucket list item, that freighter trip from Brooklyn to Cape Town, the same one I took in '71. What happens if something happens?

Each day (or each hour), it'll impose itself in small or big ways, making me wonder "what if?" It already has.

That is to be the biggest part of this rehabilitation. Not the rebuilding of muscle tissue that disappeared from 15 days in a California hospital. Not the healing of the meandering wound on my skull or between the layers of the brain. But what's "in" the brain: my thoughts, my doubts, my uncertainty.

That is the hurdle I'll need help in clearing.

And I'm not terribly confident I'll succeed.

But I'll try.