Wishing him well

I saw this story about Robert Jordan on Neil Gaiman’s site today. First of all, how come I didn’t know Robert Jordan was a pseudonym? I thought I was up on all of that stuff. However, that’s neither here nor there. If you read the story, you’ll see that one of my favorite authors has amyloidosis with cardiomyapathy, which sounds scary and life threatening and painful.

Robert Jordan’s books have entertained me for years. I read the first book in his Wheel of Time series back in 1989 after my mom picked up an autographed copy for me at Borders as a Christmas gift. I was immediately caught up in the story of Rand al Thor and his companions, and have eagerly bought and read every one of the books that followed. I tried to get one of my college friends interested at one point, but she sniffed and said “eh, he’s trying to be Tolkien.” Well, my deep dark fantasy geek secret is that I’ve never read Tolkien, or more precisely, I tried to read the Hobbit when I was too young to really get it, and hated the character of Gollum so much that I gave up on the book and never tried to read any of the other books. I do like the movies, so I keep thinking I should give it another try, but I haven’t gotten around to it yet.

So I can’t really say for sure that he isn’t trying to be Tolkien, but I can say that I’ve always liked his books and think they stand up just fine on their own. Last year, when I was in the middle of infertility hell, they became particularly special to me. I was getting up insanely early and sitting in traffic as I tried to get in to the doctor’s office for monitoring before work…spending hours (seriously, hours, plural) every day sitting in my doctor’s waiting room, waiting for my turn on the sonogram machine…then spending even more time sitting around the waiting room in the lab so they could give me yet another bruise in pursuit of my hormone levels…and finally coming home, feeling stressed and tired and lousy and bloated from all of the thousands of dollars worth of Follistim I was injecting into my stomach. And as I waited, for doctors, lab techs, for the days to go by to see if the cycle was going to work – I read his books and escaped to another world. They really helped me cope, and made a difference in how I felt. So I’m sorry to hear he’s having his own health problems, and I hope that his treatment goes well, and that he does indeed get to write his 30 more years of stories. I certainly want to read them.