Oilpressure

Welcome to 2025! We are now at that point in the NTT IndyCar Series offseason where we stop referring to the 2024 season as “this past season”, and now call it last season. Conversely, the 2025 season will no longer be called “next season”. Instead it will be “this coming season” until it begins in less than two months. From there it will simply be “this season”.

Christmas was good to us. I was off from work for almost two weeks and it was good to relax. It gave us a preview of what life will look like for us a year from now. I have informed my employer at my day job, that I will be officially retiring on Friday Dec 19 – less than fifty weeks away, but who’s counting? I am fortunate to still be in excellent health at my ripe old age. All things considered, Susan is in reasonably good shape. There are still a lot of things we’d like to that, surprisingly, don’t involve racing. We’d like to get the chance to do them before we are no longer able to. I’ll be 67 at the end of this year. My father was in excellent health until he was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer, and died six months later at the age of 68. Hopefully I won’t follow his path, but I don’t want to be working until the day I die like he did. I’d like to think that Susan and I both have about 25 good years left in us; but we want to enjoy our early retirement years, while we can. Hence, I will be headed out to pasture professionally at the end of this year.

As far as this site goes, I will play it by ear – as usual. This May will mark 16 years for this site, that began in May of 2009. I would like to continue for a while longer, but we faced more obstacles than usual this past year at individual tracks. If that continues into this year, things may change. Stay tuned on that front.

New Year’s Eve was spent the way I like it – at home. Susan cooked a delicious prime rib dinner (pictured). I had a couple of glasses of red wine with it, but Susan abstained. She no longer drinks due to health reasons.

We ate dinner around 9:00 pm and actually stayed up to watch the ball drop, but I’ll admit we were probably in bed by 12:05 am. From there things went downhill quickly.

Susan woke up at 3:00 am with a stabbing pain in her side. By 6:00 am she had high fever and she was nauseous. Knowing that we could probably rule out pregnancy, we decided that this might be something we shouldn’t play around with. Our planned day-long festival of ballgame food and football quickly devolved into spending New Year’s Day at the Vanderbilt ER. After arriving shortly after noon, we were finally seen around 4:30 pm and she finally got admitted into a room at 9:00 pm. This was not the way I envisioned starting off the new year.

The good news is there is no new cancer. After what she has been through (pancreatic cancer) for the last four and a half years, that is always the first thing that pops into your head whenever she has problems. As it was when she had an intestinal blockage back in September caused by scar-tissue from her radiation treatments, this was an after-effect of her treatment she received back in 2020.

The treatments for cancer can sometimes be as tough as the disease itself. Your body is never the same. Her chemo had caused problems with her liver back in 2022, resulting in her having a stent inserted into her liver that summer. For whatever reason, the stent failed last week. It either got clogged or collapsed, but it was not doing its job and she was having excess bile build up in her liver. From what the doctors said, that can be extremely painful. Surprisingly, she was never jaundiced or even had the hint of a yellow appearance.

Thursday afternoon, she had a procedure and replaced the stent. Unfortunately for her, they also inserted a biliary drainage tube that she will have to wear for a while. She had one of those when we went to Road America in 2022, and it did not go well. As we left a restaurant one night, she accidentally hit the drainage valve as she was getting into my car. Without being too graphic – bile gushed all over the front seat of my car, which was only eight months old at the time. Surprisingly, bile does not stain nor does it have any odor. That’s a good thing. Hopefully, her drainage tube & bag will be removed before we start going to races. We had not planned on going to the first few race anyway.

To make this a long story, 2025 started as a long wait in the ER waiting room. As you can imagine, there were a lot of interesting characters there on New Year’s Day. The day ended with me driving home alone, wondering what was next. Again, this was far from how I thought New Year’s Day would go, even just 24-hours earlier.

The story has a happy ending, however. Just a simple and relatively non-invasive procedure has made the pain and discomfort go away, and she feels like a new woman. She was discharged on Saturday and has already gone back to work. After everything she’s been through and what we feared while sitting in that God-awful waiting room – if dealing with a drain for a couple of months is the worst thing to come out of this, I think we are in pretty good shape. My hope is that we have gotten our hospital visit for 2025 out of the way early. We have a lot of races to attend this year.

Please come back on Wednesday. There is a lot of racing news to discuss. More seats have been confirmed, a team takeover is complete and a few more nuggets dropped since I went on my break.

It is good to be back after my long winter’s nap. The season starts in less than two months, and pre-season testing will be getting underway very soon. January can be bitter cold, as it has been here in Nashville for the past few days. But knowing that racing is just around the corner keeps me just a little bit warmer. Happy New Year!

George Phillips

This entry was posted on January 6, 2025 at 4:02 am and is filed under IndyCar. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.