Last Man On The Moon

I'm currently reading Gene Cernan's autobiography, called The Last Man On The Moon. Gene commanded Apollo 17 and was the last man (thus far, anyway) to walk on the moon. I've seen a fair piece of Gene in interviews and TV shows since, and I've always been favorably impressed by his inherently interesting nature, his good humor, and his accessibility.

His book is no different. It is an amusing read, full of interesting asides and amusing little stories that give his story a certain human interest. But he's not above basking in the triumph of what he and his associates accomplished, and who could possibly gainsay him that either?

But there is something in the book that took me somewhat by surprise. A great many astronaut biographies tend to "circle the wagons" by carefully hiding (or, I imagine, flatly lying about) questions about the relative fitness of various astronauts. Nobody ever seems to go out on a limb and say "So-and-so was a real bastard, and a crappy pilot too."

But Gene does. He is fairly candid in his comments about other astronauts, and one thing that comes through with special emphasis is an open disdain for Buzz Aldrin. Gene doesn't call Buzz "goofy", a word he reserved for Ed Mitchell, but he doesn't have any respect for Buzz either, whom he seems to regard as unqualified, unbalanced and lacking in discernment.

I happen to feel for Buzz. He went through a great deal of difficulty that he didn't really deserve, and I tend to cut the man slack. But then again, I never had to fly into space with him either...

PET Scan

By this time tomorrow, I should be emitting gamma rays. Yes, tomorrow is my PET scan. They'll no doubt tell me that Dawg is chunky and ill-behaved, Elmo is obsessive and spoiled, Baxter is trouble after nightfall and Max is mean clean through.

I wonder if they'll give me my bone marrow biopsy results tomorrow or not. I'm getting a little anxious to know, one way or the other, if I have to deal with another course of chemo or not.

What complicates the matter is that I scare myself. I've become fairly obsessive about checking myself for swollen nodes, especially in my left groin where the Original Node popped up. And every now and then I feel a bump and think Oh no, it's back! The node is back! This is always accompanied by a sinking sensation in my guts, a sinking sensation fueled by the all-too-recent memory of the first course of chemotherapy.

Then I realize it isn't a node at all; I'm merely feeling the upper end of my femur. Or am I? No, really, it's the femur. Or is it a node?? No, it's the femur. Or...

You get the idea. And it isn't pretty.

My recovery from chemo isn't going as well as I expected, by the way. I guess one shouldn't expect to bounce back immediately from six months of being poisoned, but I really do wish my digestive tract would get itself sorted out. I can deal with the tingling in my feet, the ache in my legs, the decaying fingernails, the lack of nasal hair, the neuralgia in my hands, but the intestinal chaos is really too much.

So you can perhaps understand the horror I feel when I think I've found a fresh node...

Who Needs Transformers?

I enjoy going to a podunque little Chinese buffet around these parts. At least some of the amusement comes from the misspelled sign over the Mongolian Beef, which reads "Mongonian Beef". This always makes me chuckle as I think about Outer Mongonia and Ulman Batoor and what Genghiz Khan would think of all this Mongonian business.

But there's more. There is the ubiquitous tray of "General Tso's Chicken". There really was a General Tso, who served as a general and statesman in China in the last half of the 19th Century, and was responsible for putting down a great many revolts and uprisings. Depending on who you listen to, General Tso was responsible for over 100,000 "enemy" dead, most of them apparently during the Taiping Rebellion.

So this is why you need a good PR firm on your side. You spend the bulk of your life putting down rebellions, only to turn into a chicken dish at the end of your life. Is that a fitting reward for a senior military commander?

But worse things have happened to others. Paun von Hindenburg, for example, served as a field marshal in the German Army in WWI and went on to be President of Germany (where he contemptuously referred to Adolf Hitler as "the Bohemian Corporal") before he was suddenly transformed into a Zeppelin ("But still a gasbag," one imagines his critics remarking). Imagine his dismay when he burst into flames over New Jersey. "Pfui! I should have remained a field marshal!"

Or Charles de Gaulle, who for years was the symbol of French nationalism, French pride, and French hubris before suddenly becoming an airport known mostly for diesel fumes and congestion.

I plan on becoming a variety of meat loaf sandwich in my declining years.

Tour de Whatever

I enjoy watching the Tour de France on Versus. I don't really a wet slap for cycling in general, I don't know anything about it as a sport, and the whole Lance Armstrong thing doesn't move me one way or the other. Mostly I watch it because it is an excellent way to see a bit of rural France. It's like taking a bus tour without actually having to be there, and I like that.

Immaculate

I'm always amused by the way that drinking alcohol alters my perception of Jim Morrison's poetry. When I'm stone sober, I dismiss Morrison's poetry as the drug-addled gibberings of a fruitcake, but the more I drink, the more I start to think that I'm right on the edge of figuring out some deep meaning therein. If only I could think harder, concentrate more thoroughly, open up more mysterious brain receptors with even more vodka, the meaning of Morrison would become manifest to me and a great many things that confuse me about modern life would be cleared up.

It's almost sad, in the sense that I think I'm on the edge of learning something Real and Significant about the world, but one of two things happens. Either I stop drinking and eventually sober up the point that Morrison goes back to being what he was, a drug-addled pop star, or I drink too much and pass out on the floor of the bathroom and, predictably, stop thinking about Morrison in particular.

I haven't reached either state just yet. I haven't stopped drinking, but I haven't passed out either. Mostly I'm wistful in advance for not being able to figure out anything meaningful about the world in spite of everything.

Let me tell you about heartache and the loss of God,
wandering, wandering in hopeless night.
Out here in the perimeter there are no stars
Out here we is stoned,
Immaculate.

The Agony of De Feet

You know the painful tingling sensation you get when your leg falls asleep and starts to wake up? That's exactly how my feet feel now, only the sensation doesn't go away. There are two bits of good news, though. First, I think it means my neuropathy is healing. Second, the sensation sort of fades into the background if I don't pay attention to it.

But I always have to wear socks. Walking around without socks causes what Blondi would call a "dangerous state of over-stimulation". It's like being tickled by fifty midgets* armed with cat whiskers. I don't know exactly what that feels like, but it seems like the sort of thing that would make Blondi screech.

* Someone once told me that it was politically incorrect to use the word midget. I suppose so, but if I understand the FSM scriptures correctly, a "midgit" was involved in the very earliest act of creation. I view that as validation.

Raptop

I'm typing this as I recline in bed, which is itself a wasteland of sleeping dogs and as-yet unfolded laundry. My legs hurt considerably, which explains why I'm here and not outside doing something more productive. I believe that the numbness in my feet is starting to fade, which is good because it means the neuropathy is starting to heal, but bad because they're starting to hurt.

But nobody likes a whiner. I am typing this on my new laptop, which Jean got for me for my birthday. It's quite a nice thing, an HP Pavilion (sounds more like a tent than a computer, but what do I know?). Unusually for a laptop, it's large enough that I can actually type on it at a pretty decent clip, and the keyboard layout is close enough to my old keyboard I am not assaulted by a sense of alienness every time I reach for the backspace key (which I do a lot).

Getting it on the wireless network was not entirely easy. Jean's laptop has been on the wireless network for some time, but not terribly reliably, and when we tried to get mine to connect, nobody could connect. Mine never connected at all, even though all the diagnostic programs claimed that there was either A) nothing wrong, or B) something wrong that they couldn't diagnose.

Why is that always the way? Computer diagnostics are never helpful. Once I was compiling a huge program at work and all of a sudden got a strange message that went something like "Compiler Error #3004 - Other Error". Other Error. How useful.

But we got it working. It was a simple matter of using the right tools - what Mitch Hedberg would call "the toolkit, AKA wallet." Our wireless router was simply no good or fatally screwed up in configuration, because we replaced it with a Netgear router and everything started to work immediately. (I never could figure out how to change the LinkSys router to "mixed" mode and I suspect that was the problem, but the Netgear router made setting this option trivially easy. I'm all for trivially easy.)

So here I am, typing in bed. This, I think, is something the Romans would approve of. The Romans had a strong sense of virtue and duty and sometimes complained (perhaps too loudly) about the loss of the old Roman virtues of strength and dignity in a world gone soft and lazy, but I still think they would have approved. They did, after all, eat dinner lying down (sitting up to eat dinner was an act of almost penitential self-denial).

Tomorrow is my "I Didn't Die Of A Heart Attack Day" celebration. I don't know what I'll do. I don't feel very good, so I may just have a beer and a Percocet and take a nap. Maybe watch a Blu-ray movie on my new computer.

Age quod agis!

Random Pronouncements

1. Now that Sarah Palin has resigned as the Governor of Alaska, please, please, can AOL stop making a fetish out of her? She's the most overexposed thing on AOL since JLo's buttocks. It's positively sleazy.

2. Having seen the photographs, having watched the early tests carried out at JPL, knowing that it's equipped with a bum front wheel, and guessing that the lugs in the wheels are completely filled with dust, I'm afraid that Spirit is permanently stuck. The so-called "rover trap" has caught it quarry and I just don't see a way for Spirit to get out. I hope I'm wrong, but I don't think I am. Worse, I recall reading that the way Spirit is stuck leaves it in an unsurvivable attitude with respect to the sun this winter. Looks bad.

3. This is being billed as the "40th Anniversary of Apollo". I'm not sure what they're using as the one instant that characterizes the Apollo program, but we are coming up on the 40th Anniversary of Apollo 11. I'm not going to spend much time writing about it - if you don't already think it's the most amazing technical achievement in the history of mankind thus far, nothing I say can convince you. But I am going to remark that it's amazing that it's been forty years. I remember Apollo 11 as though it was just yesterday and I can't believe it's been forty years.

4. Speaking of anniversaries, tomorrow is the two-year anniversary of my heart attack, and by extension surviving my heart attack. I'd like to say that it's been a good two years, but when you factor in six months of chemo, six months of surgery recovery, and three months of undiagnosed cancer, well... The word "Stalingrad" comes to mind for some reason.

A Correction

Earlier I said that beta decay involves the emission of a positron and a neutrino as a neutron is transformed into a proton. This is incorrect. Beta-minus (B-) decay involves the emission of an electron and a neutrino as a neutron is transformed into a proton. Beta-plus (B+) decay involves the emission of a positron and a neutrino as a proton is transformed into a neutron.

Mea culpa.

But since I didn't have a PET scan today, I am not doing either kind of beta decay. Mostly I just have a deep hole in my ass from where they took the core sample out of my pelvis. This was Not Much Fun, but at least it's over, and this time they managed to get both some of the goopy aspirate from the marrow and a little core sample of the bone itself too, so this time there'll be none of that "We didn't get enough material to be sure" schtick. Now we wait a couple of weeks for the lab to decide whether my rogue Reed-Sternberg cells have gotten into my bone marrow or not.

Given the choice, I vote "not".

OW! THAT HURT!

Gulp!

Tomorrow I go in for a bone marrow biopsy and (I think) a PET scan. I thought I'd be better able to deal with it, but I find being on the precipice of finding out if I still have cancer or not fricking terrifying.

I don't think I actually have cancer any more, and all the indicators are good. But it's still scary. What happens if I still have cancer? It's too awful to contemplate, but it haunts me like the plot of a bad sci-fi movie (say, Event Horizon, one of my guilty pleasures).

The procedures are themselves nothing to sweat. The PET scan in particular is pretty restful, since they don't want you to move around and are just as happy if you nod off for a while. It's even fun to lie there and think about what's going on in one's body (I'm not sure, but I think the radioactive flourine in the tagged glucose undergoes beta decay, releasing a positron and a neutrino as a neutron turns into a proton. The positron presently collides with a regular old electron, and the two anti-particles annihilate one another and produce a pair of 511 KeV gamma rays moving in opposite directions, which readily pass through one's flesh and are picked up by the detectors - and people say that nuclear engineering is boring! The neutrino proceeds out on its own, but interacts so weakly with normal matter it could probably pass through the entire Earth without even noticing).

But never mind. Tomorrow is when the rubber meets the road, when six months of chemotherapy either pay off or are revealed as a cruel hoax.

I'm cold and scared.

Same As It Ever Was

I thought I was starting to feel better with the cessation of chemo, but it didn't last. Last night I started to feel pretty bad, and have continued to worsen throughout the day today. The pain in my legs, hands and colon are now as bad as they have ever been, and I'm back to the position of having to dread being more than 90 seconds away from a bathroom.

Isn't fair, isn't fair at all. Barring occasional brief exceptions and fugues where I simply don't notice anything, I've felt like crap since July 4th, 2007, when I had my heart attack and started down this wretched trail. Since then, it's been a fairly unpleasant continuum of surgery, chemotherapy, bone marrow biopsies, illness and fatigue. There's probably a pretty good metal song in there somewhere, if only I could A) write a song, and B) actually play a song. I'd love to get a guitar, a suitably gnarly pedal and an amp and experiment with said song, but NO, I have to pay medical bills. Put that on the list of other stuff to be irritated with.

I don't mean to sound too histrionic. I don't, after all, want to come off sounding like the bipedal equivalent of Staind* or some angst-riddled grunge act whose chief selling feature is a studied inability to cope with anything. I was just looking forward to feeling better, and I was feeling better, but now I'm not feeling better, and it irritates me because I was looking forward to going swimming today and I can't. Oh, I suppose I could, but it wouldn't be prudent...

But all is not lost. I still have my d20 rules to read, the grill will be lit soon, and as it turns out, I'm better at putting up with prolonged fatigue and illness than I thought I would be. And Amorphis still sounds pretty good to me. Soon I'll be switching to Sentenced, but not just yet. So I'm irriated by this downward spiral in my intestinal fortunes, but not crushed. As the Governator would say, Dat vich does not kill me makes me schtronger. Get to de choppah!


* Metal can express a wide range of emotions, but one thing it does not do is whine. Ever. Take that to the bank.