Dear Marion,

When I went to bed at 1 a.m. last night, I determined to get up early
so as to be prepared to sign for the receipt of a telephone transponder
which I am expecting to receive by priority mail. Notwithstanding its
impressive name, it costs only $35.- I use it to activate and deactivate
the computer with which I take surveillance pictures. The transponder
I've been using may have been damaged by lightning. When plugged in,
instead of answering the phone like a dutiful answering machine, it
generates a busy signal, - as if it were protecting an over-worked
doctor's office, making it useless for computer control. I hope it's
the machine and not some quirk in the telephone voltages, which, given
the obtuseness of the telephone company, would be much more difficult
to obviate.

And then I dreamed, a very complex pathophysiological web, - straight out
of first year clinical pathology -, aggregating the signs and symptoms of
several of the patients I have on my mind, provoking this morning a
critical reconsideration also of the questions raised in your pulmonology
report. I come to the same conclusions which I reached last night: I don't
know. The only facet about which I have a glimmer of certainty is that the
pulmonologist doesn't know either: doesn't know whether you have asthma,
doesn't know whether you need in-flight oxygen, doesn't know what, if
anything is transpiring in your thoracic aorta, doesn't really know what's
going on in your lungs either.  That's why we need pulmonologists.
 
The immediate question: should you have supplemental oxygen on the flight?
If you telephone Air France, tell them your medical problems, ask, whether
if needed they could supply emergency oxygen, they might answer "yes". In
that case I would proceed on the assumption that you would NOT need oxygen,
and if that assumption proved wrong, I'd consider the cost of the oxygen 
part of the travel expenses. Or, they might refuse to take you unless you
had a physician's endorsement and brought your own oxygen apparatus, a set
of conditions which might force you to cancel your trip.

Whether to accept the risk of getting seriously sick on foreign soil,
seems to me a highly personal decision. When I write "what I would do in
your position," please take me literally. I'm not telling _you_ what to
do. I would assess and try to anticipate your friend Pierre's reaction, if
you became so ill that you couldn't go home. If under those circumstances,
he would be grateful for the opportunity to take care of you, then I 
would surely go. But if under those circumstances he would consider your
visit an imposition, and wish he'd never invited you, - then I'd anticipate
the worst and stay home. Please forgive me my candor.

Also reconsider Hoelderlin's poem Patmos. In this context it seems
to me to become very meaningful:

_         	Nah ist
Und schwer zu fassen der Gott.
Wo aber Gefahr ist, wächst
Das Rettende auch.
Im Finstern wohnen
Die Adler und furchtlos gehn
Die Söhne der Alpen über den Abgrund weg
Auf leichtgebaueten Brücken.
Drum, da gehäuft sind rings
Die Gipfel der Zeit, und die Liebsten
Nah wohnen, ermattend auf
Getrenntesten Bergen,
So gib unschuldig Wasser,
O Fittiche gib uns, treuesten Sinns
Hinüberzugehn und wiederzukehren.

Jochen