I’ve got the day off of work to take care of some  appointments.  It’s almost been two weeks since we announced Trish’s cancer to everyone and five weeks since we found out ourselves. An eternity.

Cancer Cosmology

The streets of Bethesda are busy with lunch-seeking people but I’m just wasting a little time before my first appointment (with our great financial planner/advisor.)   To most, it’s a classic spring day in Maryland; cool and sunny and bright.

The sunlight doesn’t warm my skin though, I absorb it like a black hole.   It gets converted to nothingness.   I’m depressed.

In 1994, I was struggling to understand my first (and deepest) clinical depression. I expected depression to be like sadness, but that’s not the way it is for me.  I couldn’t  feel anything.   I was puzzled.

A friend described depression as being “when life feels like a distant radio station you can’t quite tune in.”  And then I understood it.

Static.  Low signal-to-noise ratio.   That’s what I feel like today.  I’m here, but I can’t quite tune in reality.  My body shut off my feelings as a defense mechanism.

A Dim Star

Trish, I think, is suffering too.  But she hates the word and the clinical diagnosis ‘depression,’ probably because to her it signifies weakness or emotionality, which she abhors.  Instead she calls herself ‘mopey’ but I suspect she is dealing with the same thing.

A few miles down Wisconsin Ave, Trish  is doing her best to stay lighthearted.  She fakes being a rich lady at Saks Fifth Ave and made the sales staff attend to her while she tried on their most expensive evening dress.

We’re not talking ready-to-wear.  This shit is couture by Zang Toi that you can only get custom made and probably costs $10,000.  She looks magnificent in the photo they took. (Since you can’t tell the difference, I’ll tell you.  The runway model is the one on the left.)

Good for her!   Walking in sunlight, trying on a couture dress: we do small things to combat the depression.  They work a little bit, but honestly, not much.  It’s too powerful a force.

Beowulf and the Big Bang

When I was about 12, I sat at my Brooklyn parent’s breakfast table.   I don’t know how the subject of cosmology came up over kippers and scrambled eggs, but any topic was fair game at that dining room table.  You had to stay on your toes.

(Years later at that same table, Trish’s jaw would drop when Thanksgiving dinner conversation turned into a spirited discussion about Beowolf, including some guests that could quote original passages from memory.)

I have never read, nor will ever read, Beowolf.  But I did try to read the book recommended to me that Sunday morning about the birth of the universe; ‘The First Three Minutes’, by Steven Weinberg.  It’s a 200-page account of the first 180 seconds of this universe, during which everything we know and don’t know was created.

Weinberg predated Carl Sagan and Stephen Hawking’s more eloquent writing and I couldn’t get through most of his lessons in physics.  But for a young kid, the idea that you could spend 200 pages describing 3 minutes of cosmic-scale activity was a paradigm-shifting perspective.

It is hyperbolic to compare, I know, but the last few weeks have felt like a big bang. From nothingness has erupted a mind-boggling spread of debris that is changing so fast we barely have time to recognize it as it hits us.

We are being pummeled by psychic, existential crap. Were I able to record it and examine it, I could easily fill 200 pages on everything that we have experienced and thought in the past few weeks.

Interestingly, it was the the ‘public’ announcement to friends and family and the outpouring of your thoughts, prayers and offers of help that triggered the explosion.  I don’t know why, but even though we knew about the cancer a month earlier, it wasn’t real until we shared it with you all.

I suppose the ‘secret’ we held protected us from the pain of the reality.  And by getting public consolation, we no longer can ignore, even for a brief moment, that Trish has been diagnosed with a deadly disease.

Psychic debris

Once again, my words in this blog are completely inadequate to describe what happens when you learn your spouse has terminal cancer.   But I will try.

At first it was crying and grief, on and off, unpredictably.  I burst into tears driving on 495, and had to pull the car over to maintain control.  Trish, who is even less comfortable crying that I am, couldn’t even drink a cup of coffee one morning without sobbing.  “I just don’t know what to live for anymore, or what the point is” she weeps.    It’s not like her to question life like that without being in real pain.

The outward grief then became a begrudging, silent despair and then finally to anger;  anger at her misfortune, anger at cancer and sadly, anger at each other.

The patient and caregiver relationship is not always a supportive and healthy one. There is a lot of resentment and frustration, although much of it misdirected.  Even though we share a lot of love, we are each going through this alone, in a way.

The grief, anger, despair and depression rise, fall and rotate, making each day an unpredictable mess.  And eventually as the burden becomes to big, depression sets in and I feel lifeless.  (Again, I think Trish does too, but not sure.)

We try to protect the kids from it, but it’s hard. The kids are managing okay outwardly, and fortunately there is a lot of school activity right now.

Their spring Shakespeare play begins soon and they have frequent rehearsals.  (Picture above is of Emma performing Measure for Measure set in modern Afghanistan with Lumina Studio Theater. )

A medical update

There isn’t much to report medically.  Trish has completed two weeks of radiation and the doctor says the lump feels a little softer which means they are killing it.  The radio-oncologist told us to be confident that he would eliminate cancer in the node.

And if she gets a clean scan in a few more weeks then she will be in remission.  After the radiation and a month-long break, she will begin chemotherapy and will hopefully remain in remission for a long time.

Joy of Motion 35th anniversary

Saturday evening Trish and I get dressed up and drive in the rain on a date. We eat in Bethesda at Guardado’s and it is predictably mediocre.    Rod Serling chuckles.

Afterward is the Joy of Motion Dance Center 35th anniversary event.  (Who invented the word ‘gala’ and isn’t ‘gala event’ redundant?)  Trish has attended JOMDC’s classes for years, and she really loves them.  All her friends from her regular Monday night modern class are there doing goofy stuff like the Electric Slide.  They all look great.  My job is to sip club soda and do my best to look like Trish’s trophy husband.

Hopefully things get easier, but I’m not too optimistic.   Last time (2010) I was surprised at how long it took to adapt and deal with this.  I’m preparing for an epic journey.

No related posts.

The kids went back to our lodge cabin after a delicious breakfast.  In the open air dining area, Trish and I linger, drinking real Costa Rican coffee (which we found to be rare in Costa Rica).   I write and edit photo’s for that day’s blog entry on my laptop.

When I look up there are tears running down Trish’s face.  She turns away from the other people eating breakfast who are laughing and eager to do their adventure day in Costa Rica.

Watching her weep, It’s hard not to sob in sympathy and my own despair.  She’s been avoiding crying the entire trip, hiding tears  from the kids so they can enjoy the vacation.  We’ll talk to them when we get home.

The day before we left, Trish was diagnosed with Stage IV metastatic, triple-negative breast cancer.  Her fight with cancer continues.

The love of my life, and the most amazing mom to my daughters has a very deadly disease.

Evoking the spirit of 2010’s Cancerpalooza, she jokes edgily that she wants to control who I marry when the cancer eventually takes her. It’s a good effort at humor, but it still goes flat.  We haven’t gotten enough perspective yet for humor to be healing.  The hurt and fear is too raw.

Neither of us can put into words how we feel.  It’s just best to get through the vacation first and do it a day at a time.  Costa Rica is a great trip, life-affirming.  In the most adrenaline filled moments, we even forget reality for a moment.  But then again we both find ourselves lost in thoughts and memories.

Back at home

We’ve been home for a week now and any glow from the vacation has worn off.  We had considered cancelling the trip but agreed it was better to go.  We don’t regret that decision.  News like this takes time to process emotionally, mentally and physically.  Staying at home doesn’t help anything.

But still, coming back from vacation is much harder than we expected.  Trish burst into despondent tears at her favorite Dance class last Monday night.  “What’s the point?” she sobbed anticipating a life of chemo-fatigue,  “I’m never going to get any better at dance than I am right now.”   Dance has been a source of comfort, passion and love for Trish.  I’ve never seen her like this.

We talked with the kids on Sunday.  It’s hard for them to understand completely but that’s okay.  It’s not important right now for them to focus on the future.  She’s healthy and here today, and will be for the near term.  Lily has visibly struggled the most, calling home daily from school and weepy.  I got them pink Kindle Fire’s, which they adore.  That helped soften the immediate blow.

The future?

We were told to think in ‘years, not decades’ by the oncologist, and to take it ‘a month at a time’.  Stage IV cancer isn’t curable, but with some luck it can be held at bay for a long time.

There is some reason to be hopeful for many years to come, primarily because it was caught early.  The complete diagnosis and treatment story is here for those that want more detail.

There are simply no words to describe the feeling and thoughts she is going through.  If you are reading this you probably care deeply about Trish yourself and you can only imagine the existential crisis this creates.  Trish is a grounded, practical and stoic human being.   To see her dislodged, shaken and existentially despairing is unbearable.

Let’s stay hopeful

There are some positive things to consider.  For one, Trish is a fighter and a survivor.  She had salmonella poisoning at age two, was thrown violently off a horse and only broke several bones at age eight, suffered a horrific car accident where she should have bled to death at 21 , walked for two weeks on an undiagnosed broken back that should have paralyzed her, birthed her first child through an emergency c-section (and second one with a bad-ass VBAC) and has been treated for this aggressive cancer three times including a lumpectomy, radiation, two brutal chemotherapies and a double mastectomy.

She has been cheating death from childhood and there is no reason to think she will stop.  Along with cockroaches and Keith Richards, Trish just may out live us all.

Second, we are not completely shocked by this diagnosis.  And we have been preparing for this since her first cancer.  Even though she had every reason to think she would completely survive the first cancer in 2004, we had an epiphany.  We changed our lives

Both of us quit our high-stress jobs (me in 2006 and her in 2009) and we’ve been taking our kids traveling around the world.  For us, sharing the experience of adventure travel with out darling girls is the most important thing we could do in life.

Our goal is to take them for a year of international travel. So far, we’ve done 22 weeks on 6 major trips to 18 countries.  We’re already doing what matters.

The third is that she has caught this Stage IV early and has an extra weapon to deploy – localized radiation.  They don’t often treat stage IV with radiation because there is no point once it’s in multiple sites.  But she has just one.

She will nuke this lump right now and be in remission (with luck) by June.  Then she will start a low-side-effect prophylactic chemotherapy in to prevent the cancer from attaching to any of the organs that are vulnerable:  bone, brain, lung, liver.  We have a head start.

How is this ever going to be normal?

And now we wait.

We wait and try to find a ‘new normal’ even though we are at high risk of losing her.  We wait and hope every 8 weeks that the scans come back negative.  We wait and hope she can keep up the Chemotherapy and maintain the life she wants and deserves.

I don’t know exactly how we will do that. But I’ll do my best to help Trish and the girls enjoy the days we have.

In 2010, I made the cancer event into an adventure, thinking the diagnosis and treatment would be a few months. It was one of the most exhausting things I’ve ever done, while Trish suffered brutally with the chemo and reconstruction mess.   It turned out to be much longer but was still only a year.

How does one cope with this if it goes on for years?   Some of you are living with this now, or have already lost loved ones to cancer.   There certainly aren’t any easy solutions.  For the moment, we’re just trying to get through each day.

I’ll be posting regularly, and we’ll come up with a way to live with this.   We don’t have control over the way this will play out, but we can make sure each day is lived to the fullest.

And we are grateful that our lives have been filled with joy and relative comfort compared to so many others in the past and present.  We appreciate your love, help and support.  Wish her, and all of us, luck.

David

Related posts:

1. Week #12: The fourth chemotherapy treatment is good for Trish, hard on me.
2. Week # 18: Cancer sics evil Hannah Montana on us but Trish is saved by Prince Poppycock
3. Family Travel Moment: MV Captain Keith Tibbetts, Cayman Brac

I flippantly dismissed the lump in her right neck-shoulder as an inflammation.  But Trisha worried about it, and went to check it out when we got back.  Dr. Carolyn Hendricks, her oncologist since 2003, immediately identified it as cancer but recommended more tests to be sure. (Note to self:  Shut the fuck up.  You don’t know anything. Thank you.)

The tests showed she has breast cancer in her supraclavicular node, a group of a dozen lymph nodes at the bottom of a long lymphatic superhighway that runs along the neckline.  It’s one of the major pathways for lymph in the body and is very common to become infected with any type of  cancer. (#11 at bottom.)  Supraclavicular nodes are sentinel, or warning nodes.

We waited an agonizing week for the results of the CaT and Bone scans, which blessedly came back negative.  It wasn’t in her vital organs – a huge relief.  And it could mean that this is a a new Stage II or III cancer of another type, which would give her more hope than a metastasis.

But the biopsy revealed it was still triple negative breast cancer cancer, the same kind she had in her primary site on the other side.  And because it has apparently moved across the body through the blood stream and infected a distant site,  it is classified as a metastasis, stage IV.

But the diagnosis is slightly complicated.  Typically, once a cancer gets loose in the bloodstream, it forms sites in multiple places.  Trish has it in only one spot, her supraclavicular node, and it’s fairly big – 2.5 cm.  It’s uncommon for it to be found in this way.   This raises the slim possibility that this is actually a new stage III cancer from her right breast.

But the three oncologists we have talked to all agree it’s highly unlikely that this is the case, and are emphatic that we must treat this as if it is a Stage IV metastasis.  They also all admit that this is an unusual and early stage IV cancer.  There is a sliver of hope it might be different or more treatable than ‘typical’ stage IVs but we won’t know that for a long time.

Trish and I are not unaccustomed to strange cancer diagnoses.  Her second bout with cancer in 2010 was also a mystery because it reappeared in exactly the same site as the primary in 2004.  But with 6 years in between occurrences, the doctors could not rule out that it was a new primary cancer – the oncological equivalent of being struck by lightning twice in the same place.

Stage IV is not considered curable because once the cancer figures out how to spread across the body, it’s difficult – statistically impossible – to eradicate.   Trish’s cancer (assuming it’s been the same one all along, which is most likely) has survived two surgeries, FEC chemotherapy , TAC chemotherapy and 6,000 rads of radiation.  It’s an aggressive one and it’s not going away easily.

Stage IV is treatable, and Trish has caught this one early – so early that the oncologists want to do radiation on the lump, which is an unusual treatment for stage IV.  By the time Stage IV cancer is loose in the body, it becomes pointless to do surgery or localized radiation anymore.  Doctors focus their efforts on systemic treatments like chemotherapy.

But since Trish’s has only appeared in one place, they are recommending 6,000 more rads of radiation on that lymph node.  The radio-oncologist, a nice guy who sits uncomfortably close to you when he consults, cackled when he said ‘We’re gonna fry that node’.  There was a little gleam in his eye too.  If she kills the cancer in that node, and gets another clear body scan, she would be ‘in remission’ or NED (No Evidence of Disease) by early May.

Trish asked three doctors about the viability of surgery to remove the node, and all said it was not advisable – each for different reasons.  The oncologist cited statistical evidence that it would not help, the radiation doc said the radiation would do a better job of killing it and the surgeon said it would be too complicated given the location and number of infected nodes.

After the six weeks of radiation, Trish will most likely begin chemotherapy.  It’s not strictly required, because she will (most likely) be in remission.  Some people preserve their quality of life once they achieve remission.   Having done two brutal chemo-therapies, Trish would know better than any of us how to make that call.

But I think she is leaning toward starting prophylactic chemotherapy to be safe.  The primary oncologist suggested Capecitebine, which is a pill form of chemo you can take daily.  The side effects are considered to be milder although they include radical dryness of the hands and feet and diarrhea.

Still, maintaining her energy to do dance, trapeze and travel is her most important quality-of-life goal right now, so a low-side-effect chemo makes good sense.  Dr. Hendricks also offered a few experimental clinical trials but they would come with more severe side effects.

She’ll get tested every 8-12 weeks with bone scans and CaT scans, and the appearance of breast cancer in her bone, lungs, liver or brain would signal the next level of disease progression.  We would conclude at that point that the Capecitebine is no longer effective, and she would begin trying other Chemotherapies to contain the cancerous cells.

It becomes a race against time at that stage and is something I can barely even think about.  But we’ll cross that bridge with humor and courage when it becomes necessary.

Related posts:

1. Pink for Tink: 20-year old video game boys support Trish’s fight against breast cancer.
2. Tinkerhell’s breast cancer returns.
3. Coverage of the Pink for Tink event: Hardcore gamers supporting breast cancer

It must have been pretty cool to sit in a hot springs and watch red streams of lava a few kilometers away.  But the area has a lot more going for it than one volcano.  Today we will head down the Rio Balsa river on our first Creekmore-family raft trip.

By Creekmore standards, it’s an easy morning.  We still get up early – one can’t help that with the birds being so loud.  But we can eat and hang out for a few hours because we don’t have to be at the river until 11am.

Lily has a little fever and diarrhea.  It explains some of her crankiness over the past few days.  She’s upbeat about it and wants to go rafting anyway, which is unusual for Lily who tends to dramatize her illnesses, real and feigned.  She’s growing up.

Emma has to be prodded from her hammock on the deck where she reads her Kindle.   She’s read at least five books on this trip – maybe more.  She is definitely a great reader.

The Rio Balsa is a class 2-3 river with a minimum age of 6.  Costa Rica has dozens of great white water rafting rivers, but most are around class IV (out of 6) and that would be a little much for tiny lily.  It’s not so much age, but weight, strength and the ability to follow directions that matters.  In the US, it’s rare to allow kids to go rafting before 12 on any class.

I went river rafting with my Brooklyn family in Colorado when I was about Lily’s age.  But the white water side of the family is definitely Trish’s, who has been a dozen or more times, many with her sister Paula who was once a white water guide.

Trish and I used to raft before kids, and we miss it a lot.  Going with our girls down a river, even one 2 feet deep, is a real milestone.

It’s Easter week in Costa Rica, which is the busiest of the year.  Our outfitter, Wave Expeditions, puts in at least 10 boats.  We seem to have the runt of the litter – a smaller red boat with lots of patches.  It needs to be refilled with air before we leave. If this were serious whitewater, I would be nervous.

Our guide is named ‘johnny’ and he reminds me of Roberto Benigni, which is what I prefer to call him.  We are alone as a family except for ‘Nancy’ a solo traveler to Costa Rica and school teacher from Kentucky. Nancy is either hung[-over or scared (or both) because she doesn’t talk (or paddle) most of the trip.

The river is very, very low.  We are at the end of the dry season, and they haven’t been releasing much water.  In most places you can’t even swim if you fall out, and the raft gets stuck on small rocks a lot.

Lily, despite being a little sick, and holding a paddle that a foot taller than she is, keeps her oar in the water most of the time and giggles with glee at every small rapid.  She definitely loves this.

It’s the girls’ second time.  They went with my parents last year in Colorado for a short trip and loved it.  They confidently tell Roberto that they definitely have whitewater experience when he asks.

There are a few parts of the river that get exciting, especially when Roberto lets Lily and Emma ‘ride the bull’ on the front of the raft.

But mostly it’s just a beautiful ride on a really nice day.   There are a few sloth and many birds that Roberto points out.  We end up way behind the pack after getting stuck on rocks a few times.  There are spots where it’s only us on the river, which is nice.

Our last hot springs.

The hot springs tour is coming to an end today.  We have done ‘The Springs’, ‘Tabacon’ and today, ‘Ecothermales’.

While the other two were clearly resorts, this one has a less professional feel.  Into the pools flows hot water from exposed PVC pipes, and the pools are basically big squares.

But it is much less busy than the others, especially when we arrive at 4pm, in between the lunch and dinner crowd.  For a few minutes we are the only people here.

And though it’s not professionally landscaped, Ecothermales is in the natural  jungle with a high canopy and the deafening sounds of cicadas.  Trish loves that.  They also don’t charge for non-alcoholic drinks – it’s included in the price.  It’s a nice experience overall.

We were all ready to give Eco termales our ‘best of’ vote until the dinner.  It’s terrible.  They serve us the worst rice and beans of the trip.  (Basically canned black beans in a bowl with sticky rice.) and the chicken in cream sauce has a watery sauce and dry chicken.  How can they mess up mess up Chicken, rice and beans so badly in Costa Rica!

Our bedtime gets earlier and earlier.  I think the kids are out by 7:30pm tonight, which is good because tomorrow is our make0up day for hot air ballooning very, very early. I can’t wait.

Related posts:

1. Costa Rica Day 4-5: The Corcovado Jungle
2. Costa Rica Day 3: Lily’s bad-ass adventure day
3. Costa Rica Day 6: Mommie and Babies on the Rio Claro

‘It’s raining over there and they are cancelling today. Tuesday is your back-up day so we’ll keep our fingers crossed”, she says.  It was nice of her to get up and tell us before we drove over there – 30 minutes away.

Instead we watch the daylight grow on the gorgeous deck/porch of our cabin.  It drizzles. The volcano is completely encased in clouds, but the birds are as loud as ever.  The grounds of leaves and lizards are fabulously landscaped.

Breakfast is the typical eggs, fruit, rice and beans (Pinto Gallo).  The yolks are really orange from being fresh.  They have their own small farm here with cows and chickens.  There is also a stable full of great horses.  We’ll be taking those for a ride in a few days.

Instead of hot Air ballooning we’ll take to the hot pools of ‘The Springs’ again.  Their entrance fee is a 2-day pass, so it doesn’t cost us anything except another expensive poolside meal.

Emma really wanted to go back so she could enjoy the slide.  Last night we were overwhelmed by Lily’s meltdown-tantrum.  Emma made the best of it, but she didn’t get to do much.

‘The Springs’ was the host to one of ‘The Bachelor’ seasons.  It was definitely designed by ‘Resort Engineers’ – a job I just made up but am pretty sure exists.  Everything is textured and colored cement, and most of the landscaping is done with massive, Disney-size groupings of fluorescent plants.

But some parts, including the kids water slide are done more tastefully.  Emma and Lily play for a few hours as we pass the time until our afternoon activity.  Even in artificial surroundings, it’s nice to relax for a while.

Lily does better today.  We gave her a little decongestant and the ear trauma seems to have passed.

Extreme ziplines

Ropes were obviously used all over the world to cross streams and canyons.  But ziplines as we know them today, were probably invented in the Alps as a mountaineering technique in the 1800s.  Although it was soon-after adopted worldwide to scale high peaks, it wasn’t adapted to trees until much later.

In the mid 1970’s, graduate students in botany and zoology, eager to find new methods to justify a PhD, adapted mountaineering ziplines to trees in the Costa Rican rainforest canopy.

They were followed by many more students and eventually caught the attention of local entrepreneurs and commercial outfits as the Costa Rica eco-travel industry was emerging.

Today ziplines are everywhere there are tourists – deserts,  summertime ski resorts, beaches and parks.  There are new ones being added every year, each competing to be the longest or the fastest.

Today we are at Mundo Aventura, the longest zipline in the area and possibly the longest in Costa Rica, although it’s impossible to know for sure.   They have 11 lines, the longest of which is 1000 meters, delivering a 50 second long ride from start to finish.

Mundo Aventura does their ziplines over the La Fortuna waterfall basin, so several of the rides cross in view of the falls.

Although they give you a hand brake, speed is your friend on a long zipline line.  So is weight.  Being too light or slow prevents you from accelerating enough.  That can leave you stuck suspended in the middle of the line.

There is no physical danger, but you’ll have to arm-over-arm pull yourself the rest of the way.  And you get laughed at.  Trish got stuck in the middle of a line in Peru, but today everyone moves along.  The girls need to go with a guide on the longest ones so they don’t get stuck in the middle.

The long lines over the waterfall are the best ziplines we’ve done (we did Mexico, Thailand and Peru).  It’s a cool, overcast day, and Volcano Arenal shows it’s peak from time to time. (This is Arenal that day from local town.)

They dump us into a gift shop at the end, under the guise of a cultural show by an indigenous tribe that makes balsa wood masks.  My intent is to buy nothing, but under charming pressure from little girls, I give them $25 each to get  a cheesy mask.  Emma buys hers for a friend.  Lily wants one for herself.

We drive back through La Fortuna and get a magnificent view of the Arenal volcano in the sunset. The 4-day hot springs tour continues tonight at Tabacon, one of the oldest hot springs.  It’s a beauty of a resort with really good food.   But it feels very crowded and it was the most expensive.  The clientele are a strange mix of international young hot bodies, grey-haired resort dwellers and gigantic Japanese tour group.  (One of whom pushed Lily out of the way at the buffet, making her very upset.)

The springs are very hot and seem much more natural than ‘The Springs” It’s gorgeously landscaped. And the food is a million times better than the resort bar food at ‘The Springs.’  Everybody likes a good buffet, amirite?

‘Family vote’ I announce.   ‘Should we go back right after dinner or stay here and do more hot springs?’  The girlst look at one another and silently talk to each other in sister ESP.   ‘Go back’ they both say at the same time.

But it’s not to be – the car battery is dead.  I left5 the lights on, and they don’t turn off like every other car I’ve used in the last 25 years.  Wow, I think, getting a jump is going to be a difficult job in the dark when I speak no Spanish.  We could be here for hours.

A helpful staffer of the resort calls someone and he shows up with a truck.  Yay!  We’ll be out of here shortly.  But it takes a while to get the car pulled out of its narrow space where access to the battery is blocked by other cars.  He can pull me out to the middle of the steep road we are on, but then I have to drive it in neutral, backwards downhill with no lights, power steering or power breaks.

Much anxiety is produced.  But once we get it out it only takes another 15 minutes to be on our way.  Only in Costa Rica can you be back on your way in an hour with a dead battery rental car!

Related posts:

1. Costa Rica Day 8: Pee-mergency! and Trish is punched by a monkey.
2. Costa Rica Trip – Creekmore family travel adventure itinerary
3. Costa Rica Day 3: Lily’s bad-ass adventure day