Okay, so I’ve decided on the metaphor for helping Andrea as her Battle Buddy, and it works mostly. Yet in the same way that I said I didn’t know what my role was, I’ve also noticed that my compensation for some of that is to be in problem-solving mode.

When we were at the hospital on Tuesday, Andrea needed some bloodwork done plus an ECG. So she gets her form, she’s checked in, #94 or something and they’re serving #86 or something. So not too long a wait, probably. Except the number is for both the bloodletting and the ECG, and yet they’re in two different rooms, it’s not really clear how it all works, so I leave Andrea at her chair in the waiting room and I go investigate.

I check out the ECG room and there’s a sign that says, “Yeah, we’re not always here. If you need an ECG, go to the blood room and they’ll call us.” Okay, I wander back to the blood room and say, “Excuse me, my wife needs both done, should she wait until the blood call and then you’ll call ECG or should we call them now while we’re already waiting?”.

The woman in the blood room looks at me like I have two heads. “What, nobody’s there?” So she walks me over and knocks on the door. The one with the pre-printed sign on it that says “We’re not here.” She reads the sign, twice, and says, “Oh, I guess I can call someone.”

Now I would like to tell you that she is reacting to their absence, but she wasn’t. She was honestly puzzled WHY I WAS ASKING HER. Except that’s where the sign said to go. Anyway, she calls someone, they come down, they do A’s ECG while she’s waiting to go in for the blood, while the guy is keeping an ear out in case they call her number for bloodwork. And it is clear that he is winging it for coordination. He’s worried that her number is going to be called, and maybe stressed that we’ll be stressed, so he’s making sure that if the number is called, he’ll flag it to make sure she’s not missed (although he tells us that even if we ARE missed, we won’t have to get a new number, we’ll just go when done).

It does NOT seem very organized, and this is the main lab for a busy hospital. But whatever. I had found out what to do, pushed them to do it, my job was done. I found a problem to solve and I “solved” it. I could have done nothing with the same result, just was a bit faster with me confirming details.

We go back to the room to meet the project coordinator, and she’s not there. She said she’d meet us there, but we’re done, and we have NO IDEA how to contact her to let her know we’re ready. I wander back to the main check-in area where we met her — and the guy there has NO IDEA who she is. None. She works with two of the main doctors in that section, but no idea who she is, how to find her, etc. I don’t have her last name so that doesn’t help, but I tell him what she is doing and who she works with, no help. Ten minutes of that and she wanders down the hall just as he’s decided maybe he knows who to call. Problem solved, exactly as if I had done nothing in the first place.

We finish with her, they’re going to have someone wander by to meet us, but we have to go pick up Jacob so I nudge her to take us to the Centre that we’re going to go to the next day, we do the tour, Andrea meets the nurse who will help us next week. I have a small win here in that my pushing managed to squeeze in the tour and a meet-and-greet before we had to dash.

We went today for another diagnostic appointment, and while I was on the official list to get into the hospital (even though they checked me after waving me through the last time), I was NOT on the list to go in for her appointment. I end up having breakfast in the cafeteria (cuz that’s always exciting), then leave to take Jacob to school late and back to pick up Andrea to bring her home. Tonight, I took her to another appointment where I wasn’t allowed to go in.

Supposedly, it’s all set for next week for me to join her for her first all-day treatment. I’m supposed to be on the list to be with her. Am I on the list? I have no idea. I’m supposed to be, but I was supposed to be today too.

I’m “solution-oriented” right now, let’s find whatever is not working and fix it fast. Need a decision that doesn’t have to be made by Andrea? I’m the guy to take that one. Mostly because I can’t control the rest or help on most of it, so I’m compensating elsewhere.

Originally, I was thinking of titling this post, “My wife has cancer. So there’s that.”. But that seemed a little stark, harsh even. Aggressive. I need to step back from that point for a moment.

I frequently say to people, when we’re talking about mental health and stuff, about how I’m doing with COVID-related isolation protocols and things that “we’re a high-risk household” and/or “I tend to carry a fair amount of stress.” But I can’t share much more than that usually as it is not entirely my story to tell.

Let’s start with me though. For me, the issue has often been that I am obese and with my weight gain, I’ve hovered on the edge of pre-diabetes and diabetes numbers for my A1C level. And, because I don’t want to admit to myself the seriousness of some of it, I avoid saying, “I’m diabetic”. Instead, I say things like “My A1C numbers are high.” Or “I’m in the pre-diabetic stage”. Never “diabetic”. Until my last set of blood results jumped significantly. So I can clearly say “I’m diabetic” or that “I have diabetes”, but I’m still more tempted to use weasel words around it. My leg issues of a year ago are related, but not completely causally linked. There’s other stuff going on too. But it’s enough to raise my stress at times. And diabetes does raise our health-risk levels in the household, particularly when I was struggling with infection issues, etc.

For Jacob, he has “spastic diplegia of unknown origin that presents as mild Cerebral Palsy”. That’s a LOT of formal wording to say he has mild CP, but they can’t find the cause from MRIs or genetics. But while I talk about some stuff related to him, and what I’m dealing with as a parent, or a challenge in helping him, his story is not my story and therefore not my story to tell. I am not obsessed with privacy or secrecy, but I don’t advertise everything he goes through. I hope that at some point in his life he might share some of that stuff himself, but until then, it remains his call. Occasionally I ask him if it’s okay if I write about something specific, but most of the time, I focus on me and my reactions, not on him. However, when he was young, he had some asthma and breathing issues, so COVID scares the bejesus out of me. I can say, no word of a lie, that I have fully believed until vaccination that if Jacob got sick, it was 50/50 if he would beat it. I suspected about 60/40, maybe 70/30 for me, but probably about even money given his lung and breathing issues already. That raises the household risk level too.

But both situations pale in comparison to Andrea’s world. She was diagnosed formally five years ago with non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma, a version called Waldenstrom macroglobulinemia. Normally, people wouldn’t know they had WM until symptoms show up as something else. But she was having other medical stuff done, and they noticed enlarged lymph nodes. They did a bone marrow test, and confirmed as WM.

When is cancer, not cancer? It is, there’s no “out” on that, but when the doctor tells you that if you’re going to get lymphoma, the non-Hodgkin’s version was the better / more treatable kind, and even within NH lymphoma, WM was a really good choice because it responds well to treatment, goes into remission well, and the treatment can be done multiple times over the lifetime. In short, it’s not an automatic death sentence. On the downside, it’s not something you can remove easily through preventative surgery. Instead, you do a “wait and see” approach, monitor proteins and symptoms, and hold off treatment until the symptoms start showing up.

So she got her diagnosis in 2017. Then crickets.

There was nothing to do. I was working for the government in a unit that deals with a lot of health issues. I told my boss “our” news (I’ll come back to that later), because I thought I might be missing work to help her and because I was also in a bit of a daze, and he mentioned that the doctors in the unit were good at explaining things sometimes. I nudged the oncology expert, and she came over to my cubicle the same day with all the latest medical research, best treatment protocols, lessons learned, etc. She had access to internal “experts” databases and she shared all of it with me, walked me through a bunch of it, gave me an outline of what to expect. The same way as if someone had said, “Hey, you’re going to set up a new database for outside client data? Let me tell you what you need to know.”

It was presented all matter-of-fact, no drama, just “hey, I’ve got info you don’t have, let me give it to you”, and then she went away with an offer to chat anytime I had questions. I never did, but I sure appreciated the opening salvo in the information war.

But after “we” worked through the initial shock, and got to the point of “okay, so I guess we’re waiting, nothing to do now”, the question was simply “who” would she tell and when?

And really, that’s an interesting paragraph. “We’re” waiting, but “she” would tell.

Because when you’re having a baby, it’s considered okay to say “we’re pregnant”. But when one of you gets cancer, regardless of the support and interaction, it’s still “she has cancer”, not me. It’s her disease, her issue, her domain to decide what to do or not. Her decision who to tell or not. In both situations, it’s still “her body”, but in this one, I have no ancillary role. I’m just along for the ride.

And yet.

It obviously affects both Jacob and I. In my case, I talked about it with my social worker / therapist, and I shared the news with some close friends. I had to, because I needed support in figuring out my role, how to support her. Her call overall, but I needed to be able to share my part of it too. Not with any of her direct friends or family, of course, but I had talked to my bosses about it, purely to explain potential absences etc. I am a firm believer in sharing that info with bosses as it makes their approval of leave so much easier. I don’t mean just that it’s procedurally easier, it’s that it takes any guesswork out of the equation. And they’ve had training on this stuff, they know what they’re supposed to do, which is whatever I need, and it’s just easier to say, “Okay, so if something happens, we’ll deal with it, but it probably won’t”. And then I have to take her for a test in the middle of the day, and since they know why I’m asking, they’re not doing the official due diligence dance of wondering if it could have been scheduled at a better time, as some bosses might. Information vacuums make for bad HR management, so I share transparently what’s going on. My side of the news, with a nudge of hers.

She told her family, a couple of very close friends. And two coworkers who have dealt with or are currently dealing with similar issues. This past week, with news that she has to start treatment soon, she told all her family the treatment news plus she posted on Facebook. She told her coworkers since she’ll be off, and it came as a shock to many of them. After all, she doesn’t seem “sick”.

But early on, the biggest question was what to tell Jacob and when. And it was always going to be her call, but we were not on the same page with it. He was 7 at the time of diagnosis, and I fully agree that his age would limit any detailed discussion. “Inform to age-appropriate levels”, as they call it, seemed the way to go to me. But for her, and her doctor, the view was that she wasn’t going to be in treatment anytime soon, so did he need to know?

I watch a lot of TV and movies, I read a lot of books. We all know “revelations” of health status is a popular plot point. And more often than not, the plot point is around the person who doesn’t know something feeling betrayed when the health issues become manifest and they find out the sick person knew for years and didn’t tell them. While I don’t base my life on pop culture treatment, there is a reason that is a popular trope in stories. Because it happens.

The shock comes when they find out that you are sick. It’s big, there’s no way to soften that much. And they are hurt, angry, confused, and to be honest, complex emotions are the norm. And then they find out that you didn’t tell them something much earlier. That you have been keeping a giant secret from them. Maybe for good reasons, maybe for selfish reasons. But now they feel betrayed, and all that hurt, anger and confusion gets a target. You. Because YOU’RE the one making them feel this pain. Maybe it’s only temporary, maybe it wrecks the relationship, yet it isn’t uncommon in situations of serious illness.

For me, 99 times out of a 100, if I know something serious, I will share it with Jacob. I don’t hide things from him. I adjust for his age, sure, but he’s a smart kid with a good head on his shoulders and a heart on his sleeve, and I do not shield him from truth, if I can help it.

It was clearly Andrea’s call to make, and she made it, she wouldn’t tell him yet. I didn’t agree with that, but it wasn’t my call to make. Fast-forward a couple of years, Jacob was older and more able to understand things, and I suspect Andrea was then more comfortable with her diagnosis, so she shared the info with him to let him know she had lymphoma but they were just monitoring for now. I was hugely relieved, and over the last few months, even more so.

She’s had things going on for the last year or so, although more the last six months, and not all of them screaming “cancer symptoms”. Again, the details are not really mine to share, that’s her story if she chooses to share the details and her worries. But she got a bunch of recent tests back, it was more serious, more tests, confirmation, and she starts treatment in two weeks.

It’s definitely a paradigm shift.

If you read the above paragraphs, you’ll regularly see that I say she has a diagnosis, or lymphoma, or symptoms. I rarely say, she has cancer.

But yes, my wife has cancer. So there’s that.

I’ve known for five years, and after the initial shock, and limited attention to treatment protocols that would come at a much later date and might change considerably between now and then, the message was generally “wait and see, treatable but not curable”.

So I felt like an idiot last week. When we were briefed five years ago, I understood that she would be taking pills. Almost exclusively, I thought. It would be some sort of regimen that had a couple of intense days of medications, then four weeks wait to round 2, etc., for six months. I don’t want to underestimate that, but it seemed manageable. Yep, cancer treatment. But I thought it mostly meant pills. I knew from the material that I saw at the beginning that some people didn’t even miss work. This was obviously not your grandparents’ cancer regimen. It didn’t sound like fun, but it sounded, I guess, manageable?

Nope. I didn’t have any of that right. She’s off work, probably 6-9 months, maybe a year. It’s full cancer treatments, 6 hour treatments on day 1.1, 3h on day 1.2, 26 days of interval then round 2 (2.1 and 2.2). It’s two complicated-sounding drugs, B and R, and they do both on day 1, only one on day 2, and they do six rounds. She starts in less than two weeks. So, as they say, there’s that.

We really have no idea what to expect. The chemo is not the worst form of chemo, if that matters much before you start, and she’s unlikely to lose her hair or have much in the way of extreme side effects. Most people respond well to the treatment, and the meds are “well-tolerated” by most patients. She’s enrolling in an extra pilot that will likely mean extra pills twice a day for a year. The hope is everything goes well, she’ll start to notice a difference in symptoms in the first month, and she’ll be in remission for 5-10y, with likely another bout at some point with better protocols and treatment options.

What does this mean for me? I have no freaking clue, to be honest. I was not mentally prepared for Andrea to need to be off work for 9m, and I was not even mentally prepared for the word chemo. That was not what I was expecting at all for treatment, and I wasn’t even sure until about 2w ago that treatment was even likely yet. There could have been other things causing her latest symptoms. But no, the lymphoma is active and the most-likely cause of it all. Yet I wasn’t “worrying” about treatment needs for the last two weeks even because I didn’t know what to expect…or rather, what I expected was wrong. So while Andrea knew it was “start chemo”, I thought it was just “start pills”. Should I have handled that conversation or this issue differently? Was I supportive enough? I don’t know. Asymmetrical information is bad for HR, but it’s bad for being a supportive spouse too.

As mentioned, it is lymphoma, “a cancer of the lymphatic system, which is part of the body’s germ-fighting network. The lymphatic system includes the lymph nodes (lymph glands), spleen, thymus gland and bone marrow”.

So the obvious things need to get done. I’ll go with her for treatments, and hopefully be able to sit with her for it (if COVID protocols allow). I’ll be driving her back and forth anyway for all appointments and tests, since she doesn’t drive, even if she was able to take herself for some things. I don’t know quite how we’ll manage timings with Jacob because, well, he’s struggling with walking very far these days, so I’ve been taking him to and from school. We’ll adjust home life, routines, roles, whatever. We’ll figure it out. I’ve told Jacob it will be a tough time for mom, and well, for six months, he and I have to suck it up. He regularly gives her a hard time with his “duties” and schedule, and I told him I will be a pretty tough taskmaster for the next six months. It’s tough on him too, we discussed that, and he can bitch to me about anything he wants. But if he gives her a hard time on anything, I’ll deep-six his computer. We’ll also try and schedule more appointments for him with his social worker to talk about anything he doesn’t want to talk to us about right now.

For Andrea, she has joined a local support group online, and some of them have had it for years, with most of them a lot older than Andrea (which isn’t surprising as Andrea only knows she has it by accident, some people have it and won’t know until it kicks in 10-20y from now). Some of them scheduled their treatments on Thursday/Friday and went back to work — wait for it — on Monday. So we don’t know what to expect for her.

For me, I’m currently on an acting assignment at work as a Director, and as much as I’d like that to become permanent, it’s not much of a priority over the next six months. Jacob is up for surgery himself potentially in the next six months and if they come forward to do it, I’m inclined to push them off until the fall at least. Andrea’s treatments should be done by her birthday in September.

Oddly, the thought that keeps popping into my head is that I’m hopeful that we’ll get to use the gazebo and BBQ in the backyard a lot this summer, while making sure she has good options out there for comfort and for simple access to things like her tablet or phone while in good shade. If she can even be out there during the day, we don’t know much yet. But I also don’t want to assume she’ll be an invalid during the six months either.

I have diabetes with some active issues we’re resolving, Jacob has CP with pending surgery, and Andrea has cancer and is starting treatments soon. So we carry a high-level of risk and stress/worry.

But I no longer have to worry much about blogging and letting a veiled reference to Andrea’s health slip through that prompts unnecessary questions that she didn’t want to answer yet.

The cancer is real, and the privacy part still remains an issue. But the “secret” is out. Hell, I can even blog about it if I need/want to, as I do (almost) everything else.

I’m asking myself seven questions a week, and here are this week’s questions.

022. In what areas of life, or about what topics are you way too serious?

As an analytical introvert, almost all areas. I think about multiple aspects of my life, even mundane ones. A friend is motivated to maximize utility when spending money — such as going to theme park X and figuring out which of the restaurants has the best value for money so he doesn’t end up needing to be Richie Rich when his kids get hungry. They’re fascinating stories, and I admire the commitment, but my bent is a bit different. For me, it is more like a belief that “some day, everything will be organized — a place for everything and everything in its place”, both physically with my stuff and mentally with my approach to life.

023. What is your definition of happiness?

024. Describe a past experience where you overcame failure.

025. Write down the life lesson(s) you learned from this experience.

I’m going to use a strange example to answer all three of these together. I don’t know if this would hold for others, or be “deep” enough for philosophy majors, but my happiness equation is about simply realizing potential.

In Grade 9, my father convinced me that I should take a double period of tech…a combination of three classes through the year for 3 months each one of drafting, machine shop and electricity. My father was a factory worker, and likely saw that I had very little aptitude for physical stuff, and I would need and benefit from such a course. A trade to give me some direction. It didn’t go the way he expected but it was the best course I ever took.

I sucked at it. I had almost zero aptitude. I really liked electricity, had little discipline for drafting, and machine shop overshadowed all of it. The project for the year was a tack hammer. You basically made the handle on the lathe with knurling for grip and threading at the top with a die. The head was mostly cut and shaped on a band saw tool, and then a drill press for the center hole with a tap for threading to screw it on the handle. Then you cut the top of the handle off, heated and fired it (as I recall), and voila, one tack hammer. A friend of mine who was good at these types of operations could probably have done it in his sleep. Mine took me the full trimester, I didn’t quite finish all the intended steps but enough to finalize it, most of the cuts were the wrong angle, etc. I think I got maybe 60% on it. But I still have it. I use it regularly. I made that and it’s functional. It’s probably the maximum potential I had at the time (or still, to be honest).

In our second year, we were supposed to make a C clamp. At the start of the year, I looked at all the marks in machine shop and realized that while the project was worth 40%, that meant the rest was worth 60%. That was my other potential, the theoretical side. I knocked that out of the park and got 59/60. The project? Not even close to finished, the angle of the bar going through the threads was wrong (supposed to be level, mine was angled down about 4-5 degrees), the cuts were off. 18/40. For a 77/100 overall, about 10% higher than the previous year. I had found another way to realize my “potential”, playing to my strengths, not the curriculum.

But the 77 doesn’t mean as much to me as a tack hammer that I still use. I have other hammers, but I regularly choose that one if I can. It’s reliable, it’s MINE. If I look at mementoes from over the years, many of my personal keepsakes come from having realized some potential in me, even if it wasn’t amazing or objectively “high” against others’ abilities. I did my best and produced something I didn’t necessarily think I could.

I failed at machine shop in one sense, the first year, a low mark, but I realized my potential; I passed the second year using another potential, a dodge if you will from the assignment, and got a higher mark, but not as satisfying over time. The real success of the course though was it taught me some humility. I was super smart and I couldn’t just think my way through it. My brain wasn’t enough for the mechanical aspects. There were lots of people in my high school who were academically-inclined, and lots of people who look at machine shop or the trades as being for “dumb people”. That somehow any Joe or Jane could do it, no problem, that working with your brain was somehow “better”. I knew different.

In some way, I have probably learned that lesson too well. I know I’m not good with my hands. I made some bookshelves, and I understood the theory of joints and how to make everything look nice. But when I was done? They looked functional, not quality. Good enough for a basement for books, not something I would put anywhere else in the house. I would LOVE to build an observatory in the form of a shed in my backyard. I have all the official knowledge required on how to do it. I can cut and hammer and screw. But I have no real talent or skill at it. It would look like a fort built by a ten-year-old in their backyard. So, I avoid doing things like that that would build up some experience and maybe some skill. I just don’t do it at all, if I can help it. I get too frustrated, too fast, when the outcome looks amateurishly bad. I often say it is my “digital aptitude over analog ability” potential.

But it can also be an excuse. Jacob, for instance, will likely grow up never having built anything like that. He’s assembled shelving, he helped me hammer some shelving together out in the garage, but we haven’t built much. I don’t think Lego counts. I’m hoping he might enjoy some aspects of a 3D printer in that regard. Small and dexterous is not always the best choices for him or me, but well, we’ll likely give it a try as we attempt some board game design.

In terms of potential, I often view my HR guide in almost the same way. I found a way to explain something complex, to reduce it its constituent parts and to do so in plain language so others can understand it, and in a way that they’ll find helpful for applying that info to a competition. I applied my potential to accomplish that feat. Could someone else do better? Sure. Could someone else make a better tack hammer? Sure. But it’s not an objective scale, it’s totally subjective. It was the best I could do, and I did it.

I realized *my* potential and I’m good with that.

026. What would you like people to understand about you?

It probably sounds lame, but I think the most important thing I would want someone to “get” about me, particularly my son, is the dichotomy between subjective reflection and objective ambivalence. There are lots of people who have similar drives to mine for improving something or to dig deeper within themselves to understand something, and then turn that outward to tell everyone they meet how they can be a better self. I have no such ambition. I’m happy to share my hard-won realizations, for HR, for astronomy, for books or movies or TV oh my, but I’m not trying to convince anyone of anything. I’m sharing what works for me.

When I started participating in a couple of specific online fora, one of the most beautiful phrases to me was the simple “Your mileage may vary”. My approach to things stops at my skin…just because I do it one way, I rarely try to impose that same expectation on someone else. “I’m doing me, you do you.” And the me that I’m being is an analytical introvert who loves answering these questions as they make me think in ways I hadn’t even yesterday. A slightly different nuance than normal, a slightly different way of explaining it. Should everyone do that? Probably not. But it works for me. Your mileage may vary.

027. What is your best recent memory and why?

This question has been in my queue for the last week. And I thought I knew what I would say — I was going to talk about Christmas again, how being at the inlaws in Peterborough surrounded by family, and having fun, slightly teasing, mega laughter around the table was such a huge stress relief of the last two years. A feeling of normalcy heightened by the delay and diminished expectations of life.

But then Saturday morning happened. I slept late, I’ve been feeling like crap this week with my new med, and Andrea wanted to clip Jacob’s toenails that were overdue. I suggested that she use a special “kit” I have for footcare, since I have weight-induced diabetes, and for many with the same issues, footcare is frequently a problem. Diminished circulation, trouble even reaching my feet in terms of flexibility (yoga master, I am not), blah blah blah. Anyway, I have a better-than-average set of tools that I ordered about three years ago with the standard scissors and clippers (although better quality), plus a larger high-quality pair of curved snippers plus a metal toenail file. I suggested perhaps she could try them with Jacob’s toes, see if it helped the struggle a bit (he doesn’t like having his toenails done).

Anyway, she went and did it, she came back to the bedroom, and I asked, “So how was it using the kit?”. And I swear, as she tried to answer, it looked like it was physically HURTING her to reply. Like the question had broken her brain and she kind of grunted and moaned as she tried to answer. And then she realized what she had sort of “said”, and we both burst out laughing. Laughing so hard like we couldn’t breathe.

It is those moments that I think are most real, the most precious, the most spontaneous. A week later, you have no memory of WHAT was so funny, but there it is. (And for the record, they worked fine. The question just threw her off and she wasn’t sure how to phrase it.)

028. What are your thoughts on extraterrestrial life?

I thought I would end with something a little lighter. I think the question involves actually three sub-questions, and without the sub-questions, the big one is meaningless.

First and foremost, do I think there are forms of life elsewhere in the universe? Absolutely. There will be plants and amoeba and I would be surprised if there weren’t animals of some sort. Within our own solar system, I think we’ll find the basic forms of life on Venus and Mercury, and the remains of life on Mars and beyond.

Secondly, the REAL question is if there are intelligent species like you find in Star Trek? I’m less sure about that one. But I’m inclined to think yes. While evolution on any planet will be unique, evolution with similar outcomes is not likely limited to one planet in the entire universe. I suspect part of me just thinks about the quote from the movie / book “Contact” about how if we’re all alone in the universe, it’s a pretty big waste of space.

Finally, though, will we ever meet them? We have come a long way in the last one hundred and fifty years as a race. Maybe we will survive ourselves. Maybe we will survive an era of machines and computers. Maybe we will somehow merge consciousness with machines giving lifespans of much greater timeframes and permitting long journeys on generational ships to explore. Maybe we develop new technologies that give us much faster travel speeds than we have now. I don’t believe faster-than-light travel is possible, but I would like to believe it is. But I don’t see any of it happening in the next 300 years. Black swan events for technology might leapfrog us ahead, yet I doubt it. Not in that way. I do think we’ll find a way to colonize Mars and the moon. I have doubts after that. And sure, other species might develop the capabilities and come visit us. But I doubt it anytime in the next 500 years.