Why I'm fanatical about social distancing

I’m supposed to be in Las Vegas right now.

Back when the new coronavirus was still a remote thing happening in other places, before it upended life as we know it, my wife and I were planning to fly to Sin City, stay at the Stratosphere and drive to the Grand Canyon. It was a bucket-list type trip (the Grand Canyon part anyway; not Vegas so much).

But now of course, that’s cancelled. We’re at home for the foreseeable future. At home for work, play and everything in between. Which is fine. In fact, I’ve probably been more adamant about “social distancing” than most people, approaching even trips to the grocery store with a “get-in-and-get-out-and-don’t-go-near-anyone” attitude.

That’s because I know what it feels like to need a ventilator. And I want to make sure there’s one available for me, you, or your parents or grandparents if they need it.

Almost exactly 16 years ago I was a healthy, active college senior who went to bed thinking he had the flu and then woke up the next morning so sick he couldn’t walk or even stand. By noon I was at the local hospital, where they told me they thought I had bacterial meningitis.

I heard the words, but I didn’t really know what they meant. I knew that I felt sicker than I’d ever been, but I also knew I was at a hospital, in the United States, so they were going to make me feel better. That’s what hospitals do, right?

Well, it turned out that hospital couldn’t do it. They gave me an oxygen mask, but I still couldn’t seem to catch my breath. I was laying in bed, gasping for air like I’d just run several miles. No matter how hard I tried, I couldn’t fill my lungs. It was scary as hell.

They put me in a helicopter to take me to a bigger hospital. During that 20 minutes in the air, it kept getting harder to breath. I didn’t know what else to do, so I started to pray. First the Our Father. Then I get so light-headed and disoriented that I forgot the words to that prayer that I’d recited thousands of times. So I switched to the Hail Mary.

By the time we landed and the paramedics were wheeling me into the bigger hospital, I was having so much trouble breathing that I blacked out.

When my parents arrived that night a doctor told them that the meningococcal bacteria had spread throughout my bloodstream and was damaging my organs. My lungs were failing. They would have to put me on a ventilator.

I was sedated to make sure I stayed unconscious while the medical staff ran a tube down my throat and into my lungs. The tube was connected to a machine that essentially breathed for me. After about 10 days the antibiotics had killed off the meningococcal infection and the medical staff decided to lift the sedation, take me off the ventilator and see if I could breathe on my own. That lasted about a day or two, during which time I have hazy memories of nurses at my bedside imploring me to “Breathe deeper. You’ve got to breathe deeper,” and me trying to tell them that I couldn’t.

Then I remember a doctor telling me I had pneumonia, and they were going to have to put me back on the ventilator.
I was sedated again and intubated for about another 10 days. A doctor told my parents “He’s not out of the woods yet.”
All in all, I spent about three weeks on a ventilator. I was unconscious for most of it, thankfully. My brief moments of semi-consciousness were dominated by an overwhelming, unbearable gagging feeling. When I finally fully woke up the tube was gone, but my throat was drier than it had ever been and so scratchy I couldn’t speak above a whisper.

I hated that ventilator. But there’s no doubt it saved me. Twice, I suppose.

Meningitis took parts of my hands and feet. But because that ventilator was available, it didn’t take my life.
Because of that ventilator, I’ve had 16 more years. In those 16 years I’ve gone swimming in the ocean off Rio de Janeiro and hiked the Swiss Alps. I’ve written two books, finished grad school and gotten to know my nieces and nephew. I met a beautiful woman who I clicked with better than anyone I’d ever met, and I married her.

Because of that ventilator, I know what 16 more years can mean. So I’m staying home, until this damn virus is gone. Because I don’t want to take a ventilator away from someone else because I need one, or someone I breathed on needs one.

The Grand Canyon will still be there when this is all over.

Can we have nuanced opioid reform?

When the medical examiner's report revealed that Prince died of an overdose of the powerful opioid Fentanyl, it worried me. A national conversation about curbing the growing opioid painkiller abuse epidemic has finally bubbled up to the congressional level and the last thing that conversation needed, I thought, was a high-profile celebrity death to stir emotions.
Emotional appeals seem to have become more a feature of government in recent years. They're effective politics, because they spur action, but they're not always great for making careful, nuanced policy. Based on personal experience, I think that's what the opioid epidemic needs.
I have a complex relationship with Fentanyl. I'm deeply grateful for it, but also kind of scared of it.
The first time my mom went and filled a prescription for my Fentanyl patch after I was released from the hospital following my meningitis-related brush with death 12 years ago, the pharmacist said "He's been on this awhile, right? Cause if you just started him at this dose, it could kill him."
Indeed, I had been on Fentanyl for awhile at that point. About four months, actually, while hospitalized with the bacterial infection that caused horrific damage to my limbs. It was Fentanyl that got me through the trips to the "tank room" where wound techs and a plastic surgeon sliced off layers of dead tissue on my arms and legs until they bled — the signal that they had reached living tissue that could be saved. It was Fentanyl that allowed me to rest when I woke up racked by post-surgical pain after amputations of my fingers and toes.
I had a port in my neck where nurses would inject the painkiller directly into my bloodstream. No matter how much pain I was in, that shot was accompanied by an immediate wave of warmth and all my tensed muscles went limp. For me, it was a wonder drug.
I didn't ask any questions at the time. I was just grateful for the pain relief. But my parents were concerned from the beginning about the possibility of me getting hooked.
When they asked the pain management specialist about it, she was adamant that as long as I was taking it for legitimate pain relief, there was little chance of dependence. It would be after the pain had subsided that they would have to watch me carefully.
By the time I left the hospital I was in the process of being weaned off. The injections had been replaced by slow-release Fentanyl patches, which in turn would be replaced by little Fentanyl-laced suckers. Yes, suckers, like candy.
And then it was time to go off those too. My wounds were not completely healed, but they were more garden-variety, surface-type injuries and the pain was manageable with less extreme meds.
I had taken the painkillers as directed and was weaning off them properly, under a doctor's supervision. And yet those first couple weeks without any Fentanyl at all were kind of miserable. It wasn't so much that I was in pain. It was that I just felt sapped, fatigued, without any motivation to even get out of bed in the morning.
Those days passed and I eventually felt like myself again. But I had gotten a window into how easy it would have been to get hooked. To go drug-seeking, if I had been more mobile and under less parental supervision. To look for another doctor who would prescribe me more Fentanyl. To substitute something less regulated but similarly opium-based, like heroin. Scary.
So when people say we need to rethink the ease with which patients get opiates and the amount they get, I think back to those days and tend to agree with them. But then I think back to those days in the tank room and find myself hoping that the regulatory pendulum doesn't swing too far in the other direction, because these drugs really can make life tolerable for people who are experiencing intense suffering.
Clearly, when people who have a history of drug abuse and aren't trying to hide it get prescribed opiates with hardly a word of warning or a plan of action, there's a problem.
But by the same token, not every patient's pain can be effectively managed with harp therapy or trigger point injections.
So we need to have a really thorough, nuanced policy discussion before we make new regulations. That's the way to honor Prince. Here's hoping we're still capable of doing that.

"Ugly laws" gone but the sentiment remains

Did you know that if I had been born a couple decades earlier, I could be arrested for appearing in public?

I didn't know either, until I saw the movie Music Within. It's about Richard Pimental, a man who becomes mostly deaf due to a Vietnam War injury and then spends the next several years devoting himself to helping people with disabilities get employment. I recommend it.

The one scene that really stuck with me was when Richard and his friend, who is wheelchair-bound and twitches due to severe cerebral palsy, are kicked out of a restaurant. The waitress rudely informs Richard that his friend is unsightly and is making the other patrons uncomfortable. More shockingly, when they refused to leave, they were arrested. Arrested under what was called an "Ugly" law.

Until the 1960s and 70s, apparently a number of large American cities had laws that made it illegal for someone with an "unsightly or disgusting" disability to appear in public. I was not aware of this despite some well-regarded literature on the matter.

I started thinking about how such laws could have affected me, with my scarred arms and stumpy hands. Could someone at a restaurant have called the police and had me hauled out? It seems almost unthinkable, but "unsightly or disgusting" is not very well-defined in these laws. They're subjective. What one person finds unsightly, another would not. This gives enormous power to law enforcement and allows for an enormous amount of bias.

Surely such laws were rarely enforced. But they were insidious nonetheless, in that they prey on fears that people with disabilities already have (or at least that I had when I first became disabled). Fears that we won't be accepted or able to participate fully in society.

Times seem to have change since the "ugly laws" were repealed. People with disabilities are less institutionalized and more visible in the community. The ADA and Medicaid waiver services that followed the Supreme Court's Olmstead decision helped. But changing laws, of course, doesn't change hearts.

This CNN story about Gophers football coach Jerry Kill proves we still have a ways to go. Kill has epilepsy, and after he had a seizure on television he received emails calling him a "freak" and a columnist at a major newspaper said he should be replaced because he was making the football team an object of pity. Kill has proven himself to be good at his job and epilepsy is a well-known part of the human condition. Why the hate? Why the derision?

I'm not sure what the answer is, but I think it has something to with a misguided sense of what is "normal," and a discomfort with anything that does not fit that template. This is, of course, warped. Humanity quite normally includes all sorts of variety in the way people look, move, speak, etc. But people are uncomfortable with that which they're unaccustomed to.

It is only in the last few years that I have gotten comfortable going out in public with short sleeves and have stopped trying to hide my hands in pockets. It took time to get to the point where my honest emotion was "If anyone has an issue with it, it's their problem."

But it's also a societal problem. And we all have a role to play in solving it. Reevaluate what you think is "normal" in the context of what you know is human.

What does April 28 have against the Marso family?

I probably should have known better than to schedule my dog's euthanasia for April 28. Might have been tempting fate. This year April 28 was the 10th anniversary of me being flown to KU Med almost dead because of a meningococcal infection. The date insisted on giving us yet another scare, as if the hardship of losing a pet wasn't enough.

Baxter has featured prominently in this blog before, so if you've followed it, you know the story: beloved pooch I adopted during my return to Minnesota after meningitis who helped me through my recovery; constant companion for years in Olathe and back in Minnesota for a year after I was laid off; then separated from me by graduate school and his bout with cancer in Jan. 2012.

After surgery that month to remove his tumor (and a chunk of his liver with it) Bax continued to live at home with Mom, Dad and Grandma, where he received tremendous care as further medical issues piled up. He already suffered from arthritis that caused him to limp on his back right leg. This got progressively worse until he was practically dragging the leg at times. Then he got diabetes, which severely restricted his diet and necessitated insulin shots twice daily. He usually tolerated them well, but there were a couple biting incidents. Luckily he was also having teeth removed due to gum decay during that period so there wasn't much bite to him.

About a year ago he started to go blind quite quickly, possibly due to the diabetes. That's when we started talking seriously about euthanasia, Mom and I. Well, maybe I more than Mom. Even though she was bearing the lion's share of the Baxter care, she had a hard time imagining letting the little guy go.

Baxter had always been pretty clingy, but losing his eyesight made him downright distressed any time there wasn't someone familiar within ear shot, or better yet, pressed up against him. Then he started to have bladder control issues and getting Mom up several times a night to go outside. Or not getting her up, which was worse.

That's a very long, probably unnecessary explanation to justify why I made the decision to euthanize my 15-year-old, arthritic, diabetic, blind dog. It was difficult.

April 28 just happened. It was the weekend after Dan and I got back from South America and the first feasible time I could be home to do what had to be done.

So I flew into Minnesota Friday night and spent the next couple days saying goodbye to my dog. Fortunately the weather was beautiful after months of Arctic winter that exasperated even the hardy Minnesotans. Bax and I enjoyed my parents' backyard and the river that runs through it, just as we had about 9 years earlier when I was in a wheelchair and he was my new dog.

Then Monday came, and I was scheduled to take Bax to the vet at 1:00 p.m. Mom and I were thinking about him that morning, I suspect, which is why neither of us thought much of the fact that my Dad, who is normally up by 7:30 or 8, was sleeping in quite late. Mom mentioned it, but it wasn't until just before 11 a.m. that she went to check on him.

In the interests of respecting my dad's privacy (sometimes I forget that not everyone wants to broadcast their medical issues), I'm not going to get into a lot of details about how he was. Suffice it to say, we were concerned enough that we drove him to the emergency room. I stayed there for a couple hours, phoning the vet to tell them we would be late on Baxter's appointment and might not show up at all.

Tests that day confirmed that Dad had had a stroke. But he seemed stable and while not quite himself, coherent. He was apologizing to me for screwing up my plans, which is classic Dad. Selfless.

With a plane to catch that night, I left the hospital, went home and retrieved Baxter from Grandma's room downstairs. I asked him if he wanted to "go for a ride in the car," which didn't perk him up as much as it used to when he was younger and it practically sent him into a lather. He struggled to stand up in his dog bed, straightening his legs slowly and then stretching. In previous trips home I had seen him try to get up and collapse back down, needing two tries to stand up. Another heartbreaking sign that it was time for him to enjoy his final repose.

He struggled into the backseat of the car, taking a moment to locate the doorway by poking around with his snout and then another moment to climb in, kicking his back legs futilely at first. In my mind I had imagined opening the windows for him and letting him stick his head out one last time, but it was raining that day and he didn't seem very interested. On the advice of the vet we had given him an oral sedative hours earlier and he was pretty zonked.

When we got to the vet I had to pick him up and carry him in, thankful for the automatic doors. A young female cashier at the front of the store looked at the fluffy, sleepy dog in my arms and immediately let out an "Awwwww." She clearly didn't know what we were there for.

The Banfield Pet Hospital staff did though. They had cared for Baxter for years, helping him live longer and better than he probably should have given all his maladies. They were sensitive that day, offering me as much time with him as I wanted before they proceeded. I didn't have much time and honestly I didn't want to drag it out. As it became more real the tears were starting to poke at the edges of my eyes.

I held Baxter in my arms as the staff placed a catheter just above his right front paw. He whined a little as it went in, but was otherwise still. I stroked his head and tears began to drop onto the soft fur of his back. I think somehow he knew, maybe, what was going on. Maybe that's crazy. But he seemed peaceful. As the first of the drugs went in his arm, he fell asleep and went limp. I was sobbing as they injected the second one, to stop his heart. The vet placed a stethoscope under his chest to check for the heartbeat that would never again come from there. She nodded to the vet tech and the two of them left me alone, in a small exam room, with my dog.

I sat and cried for a minute or two, maybe longer. Then I realized I was holding a dead dog. I lifted him up onto the metal table, his body even limper than before — the lifelessness was tangible. He was no longer Baxter. I laid him on his side on the table and tried to close the eyelids completely, like I'd seen on TV. But they didn't want to stay closed. So I left him like that and walked quickly out of the building, out to where the rain could hide my tears.

I wanted to go back and see my Dad, but I didn't have time. I had to pack up my stuff and head to the airport. My brother was going to drive me halfway there and then drop me with my uncle, who was nice enough to come down from the Twin Cities and retrieve me after it became clear that I didn't have a ride anymore.

Uncle Dennis tried to engage me in conversation, but I'm afraid I wasn't very receptive. I was praying for my dad, and posting a note on Facebook soliciting other prayers. The sporadic updates from my mom and brother were too mixed to know the results of those prayers. By the time we got to the airport, I was pretty distressed and really didn't feel good about getting on a plane and going 500 miles away from my family.

It was here that a small act of kindness by a total stranger made a huge difference. I told my uncle I wanted to try and change my flight and he accompanied me to the Southwest desk. I told the attendant there what was going on, that my dad was in the hospital and I wanted to postpone my flight. He asked me when I wanted to fly. I dithered.

"You don't really know, do you?" he asked, not impatiently, but in a way that suggested he had just understood my uncertainty.

I nodded and he read off a list of options. We settled on the next night.

"How much is the change fee?" I asked.

"Oh, I won't charge you a fee," he said, as he handed me my new reservation.

It was a small thing for him maybe, I don't know. But for me it made a big difference. And any money Southwest lost in not charging me a fee it will make up for many times over in my new loyalty to their airline.

That wasn't the end of the kindnesses. I told my employer I wouldn't be back for another day and my superiors understood and were completely gracious about it. Uncle Dennis promised to come up to St. Cloud and pick me up again the next day to take me back to the airport. Then he dropped me off at the Northstar stop, so I could take the last train out of the Cities to Big Lake, where I would then have to catch a bus to St. Cloud.

Or so I thought.

Almost immediately after Uncle Dennis dropped me at the train station I got a text from my friend Katie: "Just saw your FB post — prayers are being sent your way. I'm here for you if you need anything."

Katie lives in the Cities. I knew she could get me back to the hospital faster than the train/bus. So I called her.

"Can you drive me to St. Cloud?"

She didn't hesitate. It was an immediate "Yes." And again, I was so grateful. I have been blessed with so many advantages in my life, advantages that I had little or no control over — supportive family, 22 years of good health, stable community and nation in which to grow up. If there's one thing I can take credit for in helping create my success, though, it's picking the right friends. I marvel all the time at their loyalty and generosity.

So I was back in St. Cloud when Dad woke up that night in the hospital and said, "Hey, I thought you were gone." And I got to say "Don't worry about it Dad, Southwest was nice enough to let me change my flight."

"What about work?" he said.

"Don't worry about it, Dad, everything's taken care of. It's fine."

And I got to grip his hand with what's left of mine, holding on tight with a lonely right thumb made strong through 10 years of exclusive use. The roles we played a decade earlier were reversed, but the love was the same. He is the man I want to be.

By the next day he would be much better, almost miraculously better, and I would feel much better about going to back to Kansas.

But that night we sat by his bed and we tried to make sense of April 28.

"What is it about this date, anyway?" Dad asked.

"I don't know Dad," I said. "I guess it's the day when our family gets all the bad shit out of the way."

10 years since meningitis

On Monday it will be 10 years since I contracted meningitis and my first life ended. The April 28 anniversary always makes me reflective, but this year I've had two very powerful moments I'd like to share, so I figured I'd resurrect this long-dormant blog.

The first emotional moment came about a month ago. I was attending church at St. John the Evangelist in Lawrence — a cozy, spirited place I've really come to like. The gospel reading that day was from John, chapter 9, and if you've read my book you know those verses mean a lot to me.

Jesus encounters a man blind from birth and his disciples ask whether it was the man or his parents whose sin caused him to be born blind.

“Neither this man nor his parents sinned,” said Jesus, “but this happened so that the works of God might be displayed in him."

As I heard the familiar Bible passage again, I started thinking of all the things the last 10 years have brought. I was in about a dozen weddings, met my two nieces, got my first full-time job, spoke at the KU journalism commencement, got a master's degree, lived on the East Coast and made new friends there, met scores of inspiring people through meningitis advocacy groups, traveled to Brazil, returned to Europe and published a book.

Beyond that, my story has touched so many people that I could never have reached without the adversity put in my path.

As I was thinking about that adversity, one of my favorite hymns began to play. The refrain goes like this: "Do not be afraid, I am with you. I have called you each by name. Come and follow me, I will bring you home. I love you and you are mine."

Tears welled up in my eyes and my heart was full. It felt like God was singing directly to me, through the choir and congregation. I do not talk about my faith every day, and I will never claim to have all the spiritual answers for everyone. But I truly believe I would never have recovered as I have in the last 10 years without my faith in a God that knows suffering, that feels it with us and will bring us "home" some day.

The second emotional moment also involved music, though of a more secular nature and in a much different setting. It happened last week on a beach called Pocitos in Montevideo, Uruguay.

My brother Dan and I were nearing the end of a spectacular two-week romp through Brazil, Argentina and Uruguay. It was only about 70 degrees, but we had rented beach chairs and I was sitting with my pants legs rolled up and what's left of my feet sitting in the sand, awaiting the occasional big wave to wash some of the Atlantic Ocean over them. I sat with the sun on my face, watching far-off sailboats, in a state of deep relaxation.

I had my earbuds on and was listening to my iPhone on shuffle when the song "Give Me Strength" by Snow Patrol came on. The song opens with the line "I choked back tears today, because I can’t begin to say how much you've shaped this boy,
these last ten years or more." That naturally made me think of my impending anniversary.

I won't repeat all the lyrics here, but I highly recommend the song. Suffice it to say, it made me think of my friends and family and all the support they've given me to get me where I am. And again, the sense of emotional gratitude was almost overwhelming.

"You give the strength to me, a strength I never had,
I was a mess you see, I'd lost the plot so bad,
you dragged me up and out, out of the darkest place,
there's not a single doubt when I can see your faces."

I am so happy to have survived these 10 years to learn more about what God has in store for me, what I can do for the world and to grow in my relationships. And I'm looking forward to seeing what comes next, starting with Thursday's book signing at Barnes and Noble in Topeka to mark World Meningitis Day.

A call for bone marrow donors

Here's a confession: I can rarely make it through an episode of Extreme Makeover: Home Edition without tearing up. Occasionally I'll make it nearly to the end, but the part where the family with the renovated house thanks all the hundreds of community members who made it happen always gets me.

I didn't make it nearly that far during the Lizzie Bell episode. That one had me bawling like a baby from, oh about minute 22 throughout the rest of the hour. That one I had something of a personal stake in.

Lizzie lives in Arizona, and we've never met, but we're related. We're second cousins, or second cousins once removed or something like that. Bottom line, my mom and her dad come from the same family.

Lizzie's got a condition called Diamond Blackfan Anemia that over the years has had in and out of the hospital and needing regular blood transfusions. Having spent some time in hospitals myself, I felt a kinship with her. But where I was generally laser-focused on myself during my illness, hers has spurred her to focus on others. For years now she's been organizing blood drives and collecting toys to hand out to other hospitalized kids (Lizzie's Loot).

That's what got her and the family on Extreme Makeover, so that I could have a good cry.

Lizzie's about to turn 18, and she needs a bone marrow transplant. Thus far, she's had no luck finding a matching donor. Her mom is Latino, which complicates things because all ethnic minorities are underrepresented on the U.S. bone marrow registry.

We need more people on that registry. More people of all races. So if you haven't yet registered your DNA, please consider doing so. All you have to do is swab your inner cheek and then put that little piece of cotton in the mail. Science does the rest, I guess. Biology's never been my strong suit.

Digging deep for some Twins positives

One of the attractions of going home for Eater weekend this year (along with somewhat significant stuff like seeing family and friends and celebrating the resurrection of Jesus), was being able to watch the Twins' opening series against Baltimore.

Those who shared that experience with me know that the joy of it was slightly tempered by the fact that the Twins played absolutely awful baseball. I'm not a fair-weather fan. Anyone who went to high school with me can probably tell you I was loyal to the team even then when one could count on it finding the bottom of the standings as surely as a catfish finding the bottom of a river. But this is the first time in a long time that I'm just not particularly optimistic about the season. It seems like the franchise is moving in the wrong direction by subtracting Thome, Kubel and Cuddyer without adding a whole lot.

Still, I feel like I gotta try and find some positives from opening weekend — not so much for myself but for my grandma, who will watch most of these 162 games no matter how bad they are (unless my brother hijacks her TV for cable news purposes):

-- Justin Morneau is back (and swinging well): Morneau went 4-for-10 with two doubles over the weekend, taking fat pitches and quality pitches and driving them hard. Morneau's concussion was arguably the most frustrating injury an athlete can suffer. The symptoms can linger indefinitely (just ask Sidney Crosby), even though you look perfectly fine and feel pretty good doing most everyday activities. There's no timeline for recovery and no surgery, physical therapy or herbal voodoo (that I know of) that can help. I've had one concussion in my life and I don't even think it was all that severe, but it still scared the bejeebers out of me, as it temporarily wiped out my short-term memory almost completely. The takeaway? Head injuries are nothing to mess with. It's great to see Morneau back, even just DH-ing, and if he can hit anywhere near his MVP numbers, it would go a long way to off-setting the loss of Kubel and Thome's lefty power.

-- The new additions are doing their thing: Rather than making a splash in the off-season, the Twins made their usual modest ripple. But the returns are good so far. Josh Willingham went 3-for-9 with a homer, a double and three RBI at the plate, provided an unlikely defensive boost when he threw a runner out at home, and appeared in one of the more entertaining Twins commercials in recent memory (The Big Herbowksi). If he continues to hit like that, he'll go a long way to replacing Cuddy's right-handed bat (though I don't think he'll ever throw out runners like Cuddy). The other main addition, Jamey Carroll, hasn't hit a thing. But he was brought in primarily to shore up shortstop and he's done that thus far, with a slew of defensive gems and no notable mistakes. Very important, considering last year's SS experiment, Nishioka, appeared to lose his fielding and hitting ability on the flight over from Japan (kids, take note: that's why you always pack your skill set in your carry-on bag and don't risk checking it).

-- A pretty good outing from a No. 6 starter: Anthony Swarzak was supposed to begin the season in the bullpen, but got a surprise start due to a bout of food poisoning for Liam Hendriks (which gave me a bout of morbid curiosity, wondering if he got it from any place I once ate in Baltimore). Swarzak responded by going five strong innings with a solo homer his only blemish (he probably should have been given the ball for the sixth, which was when the bullpen more or less blew it). Guys like Swarzak and Brian Duensing have had some good stretches as starters in the past and having that kind of depth can only help when the usual bit of elbow soreness, shoulder issues or uncontrollable vomiting rear their ugly heads.

Unfortunately, the back-loading of the rotation that pushed out guys like Swarzak and Duensing also accentuates one of the Twins' greatest weaknesses: the lack of a legitimate (or even close enough to be passable) top-of-the-rotation ace. In short, what they have is about 7 or 8 guys who would make good No. 4 or 5 starters. Carl Pavano might be a No. 3, and he can eat innings, but he's not an ace.

In my humble opinion, this has been the organization's biggest failing of late. The Twins haven't had an ace since Francisco Liriano blew out his elbow. I held out for a Tommy John miracle for a couple years, but it doesn't look like Liriano's gonna get one. He has to rely on his head as much as his arm now, and that's never a good equation for a head case.

An ace would push all the other pitchers back in the rotation, into much more natural spots. But as far as I can tell, there's only three ways to get one: draft one, pay through the nose in free agency or trade a boatload of prospects to get one mid-season from a team that's fallen out of contention.

The Twins haven't been able to draft one, they've shown no inclination to spend that kind of free-agent money (nor should they, necessarily — it's a huge risk) and they seem to no longer have the prospect haul to even propose a trade that a team with an ace wouldn't just chuckle at and move on. That being the case, the Twins may end up being that team that falls out of contention at mid-season. For Grandma's sake, I hope I'm wrong.