Ending As We Started

One year ago on this very day I had my first treatment of ABVD chemotherapy. Hard to believe it's been a year. Six months of ABVD chemotherapy, two months of ESHAP chemotherapy, one course of high-dose Melphalan, one stem cell transplant. I think I went one month - July - without any cancer-related things being done to me, but it was hard to enjoy because I was pretty sure my cancer wasn't dead and was making a comeback.

Today my treatment plan for the second transplant was signed off. I will be admitted to the hospital at 8 AM Tuesday to start seven days of high-dose chemotherapy. On the eighth day they'll put the poison away and give me the stem cell infusion, which I know from previous experience is no picnic either.

Monday I have to start taking high-dose anti-seizure medication. Apparently the chemo drug they will give me on the first three days can cause seizures. The chemo drug is also either derived from or mixed with alcohol; the doctor said "you may feel a little drunk throughout." Wow. Three days of drunken seizures - what part of that wouldn't appeal to the average wino? That ought to give my visitors the creeps, me alternating between drunken giggling and seizures, probably with some desperate vomiting thrown in from time to time.

After it's all over (the chemo and the stem cell transplant) they'll then send me back to Dr. Adoo, my first oncologist, for radiation therapy.

I guess the point is that I'll start 2010 the way I started 2009, equipped with cancer and doing chemo. But this much is true: my cancer today is very much reduced compared to last year. Last year I had nodes in my neck, shoulders, internal organs and elsewhere, and couldn't bend in certain directions without experiencing agonizing pain in my left kidney and right lung. Today I can't find any nodes at all. My doctor thinks she can feel one in my groin (sounds like the premise for a bad pornographic novel) but I tend to disagree. It doesn't feel like a node to me, but then again, I'm not board-certified either. But even if it IS a node, it's a small one, and it's only one, which is a huge improvement over last year. And my doctor as much as said that they never expected the high-dose Melphalan to kill the cancer outright, but merely to "de-bulk" it so the upcoming seven days of chemo can kill it.

So. I have the equivalent of a three-day weekend left to me before I go into the hospital and start the real chemotherapy. It's going to be unpleasant, but the only way out of this mess is to keep moving forward. Besides, how bad can it be? I've suffered every indignity imaginable from past chemo treatments (I've been wearing Depends since my second round of ESHAP, for example) and I can't imagine that this chemo will bring any new outrage. And I can't imagine the physical and mental suffering could be any worse than ESHAP. So it's just one more treatment to get through. I'll miss being home. I'll miss my wife and my little dog and the orange cat. I'll miss the Internet and the ability to send and receive email. But I'll survive.

How Ironic

I was supposed to meet with my doctor today to work out the timing of my second stem cell transplant, but her office called this morning and pushed the appointment back till Thursday. Turns out that my doctor got sick!

Here I am with the compromised immune system, and she's the one that got sick. Irony. Har!

It's just as well, really, because I haven't felt very good today myself. I've been cold since I woke up this morning and even a brief trip to the grocery store wore me down to a nub, but every time I stick the thermometer under my tongue it says the same thing, 97.5 degrees.

Perhaps I just have the blahs. Or maybe I need another V-8. I used to hate V-8 juice when I was a kid. The list of things I hated went something like this:

1. Adolf Hitler
2. Brussels Sprouts
3. Falling off my bicycle
4. V-8 juice

But these days I like it so much I've been known to drink it until I get physically ill. And I also love Brussels sprouts. But I still hate Hitler and falling off my bike, and I don't anticipate those things changing.

Stuffed

I hope everyone had a pleasant Christmas. Mine was. It was somewhat more low-key than usual, but it was still nice. I just finished Christmas dinner (turkey, stuffing, candied yams and all that manner of thing) and one this is obvious: I can't eat nearly as much as I used to. I read somewhere that it's actually a myth that the stomach shrinks over time if you reduce how much you eat. I've also read that it really does shrink.

I don't know. I don't have any way of measuring the capacity of my stomach except to count how many plates of food I can consume in the average Christmas dinner. It's gone down from about two and a half to about a half. Did my gut shrink? Is this some odd byproduct of chemo or cancer? Don't know.

I love the procedure of eating, and the Christmas dinner was exceptionally tasty. Who among us is not driven half-mad with hunger during the hours that it takes a turkey to roast? But somehow I just can't pack the food in like in the old days. It's a healthy change, I'm sure - forcing my innards to accept fourteen pounds of turkey and potatoes cannot possibly be good for a person. But I love candied yams so much I'm tempted to pack a few chunks into my cheeks so I can experience the flavor without actually having to eat anything.

Still, there's a kind of dark shadow hanging over Christmas. Monday I go to the hospital so we can schedule my second transplant. I've developed a sort of loose dread of the second transplant. I don't really want to spend two or three weeks in the hospital, and who could really look forward to seven days of high-dose chemotherapy? I don't really worry that anything will go wrong and I'll die, though there is a small chance of that happening. Nor do I really worry that my cancer will come back and that it will all have been for nothing.

Mostly I'm just sick of chemo. Chemo has been the dominant fact of my life for the last year and I'm growing weary of the nausea, fatigue, diarrhea and general sickness. I know it's all necessary if I expect to outlive my cancer, but I still dread it. I try to distract myself with movies, models and other hoohah, but it seems that no matter how hard I try, I end up gazing slack-jawed at the wall and dreading chemo. I've known people who actually ended up refusing chemo, preferring to die of cancer than live with the sickness. I'm not at that point, and I don't ever expect to reach that point - but after a year of chemo, I've gained at at least a glimmer of understanding of how one can reach such an extremis.

I expect, barring any complications, that I'll go into the hospital on the 30th to start the scorched-earth chemo. That's less than a week away! I have no idea what to take, or how I'll keep myself occupied. I just hope that my transplant goes well, my stem cells implant quickly, and I get out of the hospital as quickly as humanly possible.

When this is all over I'd like to go to Egypt and take a cruise up the Nile. Who's in?

Merry Christmas

It looks like I'll get to spend Christmas at home this year, and in halfway decent health to boot. That's nice, for several reasons. The most obvious one is that I'm still here - last year at this time, my lymphoma was so advanced and I was in such poor general health the odds of making it to this Christmas weren't so good. Then there's the fact that I very nearly had to spend this Christmas in the hospital undergoing the second stem cell transplant, but it appears that the timing worked out in my favor. And third, even though I was home for Christmas last year, I was in terrible shape - I had a bone marrow biopsy on December 24th, to cite just one thing.

The point is that this year I'll be home for Christmas, and I feel pretty good. I could ask for little more than that.

It worked

My new Hickman line worked - they were able to successfully draw blood out of all three of the lines, clearing away the last technical hurdle before the Second Transplant begins. I don't think it's going to be happening before Christmas though. They've only got four more days left to schedule the thing, and I just can't see it happening that fast.

My feelings are mixed. I'm glad to be home and relatively healthy (if somewhat weak) for Christmas. But on the other hand, the sooner the Second Transplant starts, the sooner it's over. I'd give up Christmas in return for a reasonable assurance that my lymphoma is going to be destroyed.

I'm starting to miss things. I'm starting to miss going out to dinner. I'm starting to miss going to lunch with the guys from work. I'm starting to miss lettuce and salad and spinach. I'm starting to miss going places like Harbor Freight or the hobby shop or the bookstore just for the hell of it. I think I'd just as soon have the second transplant now and get it out of the way to minimize how much longer I'll miss such things.

But the second transplant is going to be ugly. I just have that feeling. And I sometimes wonder just how much more I can cope with.

Catching Up

It's been a while since I wrote anything. As Inigo Montoya might say, "Let me 'splain. No, there is too much. Let me sum up."

I'm pretty well recovered from my first stem cell transplant. My blood cell counts are pretty much normal again, my blood chemistry is pretty much normal again, and I'm largely over the aftereffects of the massive dose of chemotherapy that killed my bone marrow in the first place. So what have I learned? First, I've never experienced any kind of fatigue that comes close to the fatigue you feel when your white blood cell count drops to zero. It's amazing. You can't do anything but sleep, and even sleeping wears you out. Even things as mundane as undressing and taking a shower have to be done in stages. You get undressed. You lie down for a while and rest. You take your shower. You lie down for a while and rest. You get dressed. You lie down and, spent, sleep for two hours.

It didn't help that I picked up an infection of clostridium dificile somewhere along the line, a rather unpleasant intestinal bug that requires special antibiotics to kill. The resulting diarrhea was profuse, and though I managed to drink enough fluid to stay ahead of the fluid loss, I lost so much potassium I verged into the "criticial deficiency" category - I think at its lowest, my potassium was 2.7, which is low enough that the doctors were starting to worry about cardiac problems.

The obvious solution? Hook a bag of potassium up to my central line and replenish, stat. As soon as the potassium started to go in I developed a most spectacular pain in the right side of my chest. It was as bad, and perhaps even worse, than heart attack pain. They thought I was having a heart attack; they wheeled in the portable EKG and ran some strips, and were puzzled when my EKG proved to be normal. But as soon as they stopped the drip, the pain went away. So that night I went home and tried to replace all my lost potassium by choking down potassium tablets the size of modest rodents, and the next day they tried to give me more IV potassium, this time through my old chemo port. Same result - devastating chest pain, and another night spent trying to choke down potassium tablets.

It turns out that both my central line and chemo port had failed - both had developed kinks that rendered them useless and triggered intense pain when the infusion pumps attempted to force potassium solution through them. They gave me potassium the old-fashioned way (that is, highly diluted with saline and mixed with lidocaine and infused through a vein in my arm) and eventually my potassium rose from "critical" to merely "low".

So what's the next step? I went back into the Special Procedures unit and had both of the failed lines removed and a new Hickman line installed in the right side of my chest. That was yesterday, and I still feel like I've been kicked in both sides of my chest by a large man wearing pointy-toed shoes.

But that brings us pretty much up to the present. My white blood cell count collapsed and came back up. My potassium level collapsed and came back up. My clostridium dificile infection came and (mostly) went. My old lines were ripped out and a new one installed. And as I write this, I don't feel too bad. My chest and neck are still extremely sore, and I don't have enough stamina to walk from the hospital entrance to the bone marrow transplant unit (lots of wheelchair rides for me lately). But I don't feel too bad, all things considered.

It certainly could have turned out a lot worse.

That Didn't Take Long

Last Wednesday I went into the hospital because my central venous line had stopped working. They concluded it had moved out of position and replaced it. Now today we discovered that my new central venous line has also stopped working! We don't know why yet, but I'd say it's a reasonable bet that it has shifted out of position again. There must be something fluky about my anatomy on my left side that just doesn't agree with central venous lines.

So what to do? Replace it again? Nah. They seem satisfied that they can do what they need to do using conventional IV access and my existing chemo port, though I do have to wonder why, if the port is adequate, we didn't just pull out the central venous line altogether last Wednesday and have done with it. They (meaning the bone marrow transplant unit) like the central venous line because you can access it without poking a hole in my skin. With conventional IV access or chemo port access, a needle must be pushed through my skin - the BMT unit regard this as an inferior approach from an infection suppression point of view. But I guess as a last resort, it'll do.

Besides, I don't mind. I'm all bruised up from having the new central venous line installed, but it makes me look tough.

My blood test results today were extremely positive. My white cell, red cell and platelet counts were really quite good, and despite all the vomiting my overall blood chemistry is still normal. Moreover, they hit me up with IV Aloxi and dexamethasone today because I started to get really sick right there in the BMT unit, and right now I feel right as rain. No nausea, no particular pain from my CVL installation, and immense relief that my stem cells seem to be finding their ways to my bone marrow and getting with the program.

I'll take that over a kick in the butt with a copper-toed boot any day.

First Flush

Do you ever take your car in to get the brakes fixed and find yourself testing the brakes gingerly the first few times you stop? I tend to fix the brakes on my cars myself - I apparently can't get enough of all that black dust, occasional hammering and random swearing. But still, even I test my brakes gingerly the first few times I stop afterwards. I don't know what I expect. Is the wheel going to fall off? Probably not. Is some vital brake component going to fly out? Unlikely. Will the car be gripped by that "uncontrollable acceleration" thing that was alleged to haunt Audis back in the 1980s? It would be fun, but it isn't likely.

I flushed my new central line for the first time tonight, and I confess I flushed it gingerly. I don't know what I expected to happen, but when you're pumping stuff straight into your heart, a gingerly approach seems justified. I am pleased to report that nothing went wrong. I'm even developing a dull headache, another sign of normal operations.

They say the fastest way to a man's heart is through his stomach. Well, let's time it. I just flushed my port, and I'm also getting ready to eat a small breakfast burrito. Let's see which one reaches my heart first.

Transplantitis

I had my first stem cell transplant Tuesday. Monday I was given the dose of Melphalan that kills the bone marrow (and, hopefully, the cancer) and on Tuesday I got two bags of my old stem cells back. It was... It seems that everything I write about is an unpleasant or uncomfortable experience, and I guess it shouldn't surprise anyone that the stem cell transplant was uncomfortable either. But I must sound like a broken record.

They thaw the cells but they still go in very cold, more of an icy slush than anything else. You're probably familiar with the idea of brain-freeze, the discomfort you get in your head when you eat ice cream too fast. Imagine the same thing happening to your heart and lungs. The icy fluid goes into your heart, which then pumps it straight on into your lungs. For the eleven minutes it took for the stem cells to be injected, I felt like I was having a heart attack and that my lungs had stopped working altogether. It's uncomfortable, and it's also terrifying; for a while I was pretty sure I dying.

Fortunately the discomfort doesn't last long and within a few minutes I was back to more or less normal. But boy was it an intense eleven minutes. The DMSO also gave me garlic breath. I myself couldn't smell it, but everyone around me kept saying "Wow, that DMSO really does smell!" Great. I have cancer, I've been chemoed, and now I'm physically repulsive too! Or maybe I always was and the DMSO just sealed the deal.

In the wake of the transplant, they discovered that my central line had stopped working, so they brought me back into the hospital Wednesday on a semi-emergency basis to see what had gone wrong. They shot one x-ray and said "Egads! It's hosed!" Somehow the central line had recoiled and gotten seriously out of position, probably during the frantic coughing I was doing during the actual stem cell transplant (that's my theory, not theirs; they didn't offer a theory as to why the thing would have moved).

So I had to have a new central line installed. They ran a wire up the old one, then pulled the old one out and snaked the new one in on the wire. It involved a great deal of pushing, jerking, yanking and general hubbub - I felt like the recipient of some strange and extremely violent Scandinavian massage technique. I couldn't see anything, however. They covered me completely with a sheet of light blue paper, and when they wanted to talk to me, they had to lift up a flap by my right shoulder, like a cook lifting the foil on a turkey to see how it's doing. The only part of the doctor I ever saw was a pair of eyes peering in at me under the flap.

So today my shoulder and neck are pretty sore. The chemo itself isn't as bad as ESHAP, at least thus far, but I've pretty much lost the ability to keep any kind of solid food in my stomach. I can still drink, though; that's an improvement over ESHAP.

Happy Jammie Day

These are your jammies on Melphalan. I'm smiling, so it must not suck too badly, right? Right. It feels about like ABVD, a general sense of illness, not the immediate body blow of ESHAP. But it's still early. I suspect I'll experience the worst side effects on Wednesday or Thursday, and they might well be enough to wipe the smile right off my face.

But for now, it's happy jammie city.

The Immediate Future

Here is the schedule of impending events. It will perhaps explain my sudden absence from cotillions, State dinners, ice cream socials and UN Security Council meetings.

Day Zero (Monday)

I receive a toxic dose of Melphalan. I've never been exposed to this particular drug before, but I've been exposed to drugs of its class. It is technically an alkylating agent, distantly related to mustard gas of World War One infame. It bonds alkyl groups across DNA base pairs, making it impossible for the cells thus affected to reproduce (many, in fact, commit a kind of cellular suicide upon the discovery that their DNA has been in effect glued shut). I've already done the ABVD protocol, and one of its drugs worked in this fashion. Nobody can really say how unpleasant the side effects will be. On the one hand, the side effects of ABVD weren't incapacitating. Unpleasant, sure, but I managed to keep working and as long as people didn't mind seeing me shuffle when I walked, I could generally get around. On the other hand, though, I'll be getting a monster dose of Melphalan - seven times the normal dose is the number that I remember. It could be bad, and it could be very bad. At the conclusion of this, I will be discharged and sent home.

I will also start daily courses of two antibiotics, an antiviral drug, and possibly an antifungal drug.

Day One (Tuesday)

I report back to the hospital for the reinfusion of half my stem cells. This is a precisely scheduled proceeding. My stem cells are currently frozen (not just frozen, but cryofrozen) and only remain viable for about ten minutes after they're thawed. The bone marrow team aims to have them infused within about three minutes of being thawed. Basically they get you all set up for the procedure with everything in place but the cells, then they rush the cells up from the vat of liquid nitrogen and put them in a special thawing device (kind of like trying to defrost a turkey in a sinkful of cold water on Thanksgiving morning, I imagine).

The greatest risk during this reinfusion is having a reaction to the DMSO that the cells were preserved in. Here's where having a good stem cell harvest pays off. I was able to produce over five million stem cells in two sessions of apheresis, so they only had to use two doses of DMSO to preserve my cells. People who have to go through many sessions of apheresis to get enough cells end up getting many doses of DMSO, and have a higher risk of having a reaction to all that DMSO. The doctors speculate that my main reaction will be to develop a garlicky taste in my mouth and garlicky DMSO breath. (Chemo almost always gives me a strange, unpleasant metallic taste in my mouth, so this might be refreshing for a change, though I do wish they could develop a class of chemo drugs that gives one a pecan pie taste in one's mouth.)

Day Three (Thursday)

My immune system finally fails. My white blood cell count will begin to decay immediately after the Melphalan, but it's on Day Three that the count basically bottoms out and the risk of infection becomes very serious. I'll go on full anti-infection measures Sunday night, before the Melphalan, but it'll be on this day that such measures will become seriously important. My red blood cell and platelet counts will also bottom out and I may need occasional transfusions of such cells, though that remains to be seen.

Day Five (Saturday, I think)

By now the stem cells have found their various ways to my bone marrow and have begun to colonize the area. On this day I start to receive daily injections of Neupogen, which stimulates the stem cells to divide even faster. They will also begin to differentiate. A stem cell is basically an undifferentiated cell that can turn into either a red blood cell, a white blood cell, or a platelet, and as they multiply and differentiate, my blood cell counts will slowly rise.

Neupogen is no picnic. While I thought Neulasta caused worse and more sustained bone pain, Neupogen isn't any fun either. Every part of your skeleton that contains marrow hurts. For me, it was concentrated mostly in my pelvis, the long bones of my legs, my spine, and my forehead ridge. Many people say that the worst discomfort is felt in the sternum, but HA! I fooled them; I had my sternum sawed in half and wired back together a few years ago and it has thus far not caused any pain from Neupogen. Maybe there's no marrow in my sternum any more.

Day Twelve

They expect my blood cell counts to return to more or less normal by Day Twelve. My immune system won't be normal by any means, but at least it'll be sufficiently rejuvenated that the greatest threat of infection will be over.

Meantime, if the President or the UN General Secretary want me, I'll be in bed maintaining a dutiful arm's distance between me and the rest of the world.

This Just In

We got the Official List of Restrictions from the Bone Marrow Transplant team yesterday, and it's a doozy. Upon first reading, it was so long and comprehensive I didn't know whether to be shocked or depressed. Or maybe even angry, though raising my fists to the heavens generally results in me getting my fists thwapped by the ceiling fans. People who raise their fists to the heavens must apparently do so outdoors, or have higher ceilings than I do. Or perhaps they have shorter arms.

Let's start with the idea of arms. Nobody is allowed to sleep with me unless they remain one arm's length away at all times. We have a king-size bed, but my arm is sufficiently long that if I stretch it out, all that is left on the far side of the bed is a narrow strip about eight inches wide. Who do I know that is only eight inches wide? My scruffy dog, that's about it. Maybe Manute Bol.

Let's take a quick trip of some of the restrictions, shall we? No restaurant food. No take-out food. No fast food. No city water. No bottled water unless it is reverse-osmosis. No hot showers, only cold ones. No kissing. No canned food unless the rim of the can AND the can-opener have been sterilized. No fresh vegetables. No fresh fruit. Basically no melons. No microwave ovens. No leftovers. No towels - after showers, I am expected to find pleasure in vigorously rubbing myself with paper towels (I think I'll use Brawny paper towels, just out of cheekiness). No leaving the house without a mask. No exposure to cats at all, so no more playing with Baxter D. Cat in the mornings. Limited exposure to dogs, a hardship that the poor dogs just won't understand at all. Visits from friends and well-wishers cannot exceed 15 minutes in length. No brushing of the teeth (which perhaps explains the one-arm-length rule). No commercially-manufactured ice. Oh, here's a fun one, no activity that involves knives. It's okay if I juggle chain saws, I guess, but picking up a knife and working on a model airplane is a one-way express ticket to systemic infection. I guess that rules out any chance of me turning scrimshaw into a career. No walking around the house barefooted. No shorts. No short-sleeved shirts. (For centuries the Roman army kicked the crap out of its enemies while wearing little more than tunics and sandals, but I can't go from the bed to the refrigerator without donning heavy battle armor.) No licking of doorknobs (okay, I'm good with that one).

A hundred days of this. I have a theory that these transplants cure cancer not by chemical means, but by making your life so dreadfully boring that the cancer cells become restless and move on to more exciting pastures. Compared to me, mimes and origami artists will seem incredibly interesting and exciting.

Something Just For Me

I see the Food Network has a new competition show, something along the lines of The Worst Cook In America. I don't necessarily think I'm the worst cook in America. I'm pretty bad, but not that bad. But somehow I think this show might appeal to me.

When I was single, I was known for making dishes that basically amounted to boxes of macaroni and cheese with "other stuff" thrown in. Always stewed tomatoes, often ground beef, not infrequently diced green chilis. These things turn out surprisingly well - to this day I'm partial to the taste of commercial macaroni and cheese mixed with canned stewed tomatoes. But one day I started to make this substance and discovered that I didn't have stewed tomatoes. After a moment of agonized indecision, I grabbed what I had and threw it in the pot. It was a large can of Chunky split pea soup. The resulting substance looked and tasted just like wet concrete.

Another time (still while I was single) I conceived the idea of making Rice Krispy treats. I didn't have a recipe, but I was never one to let lack of instructional materials hold me back. I knew the basis of the thing was Rice Krispies, which I had, and some sort of melted something or the other. So I melted up a bunch of brown sugar and mixed in the Rice Krispies. When it cooled, it cooled into a brittle glass-like substance that shattered instead of cutting. I tried to cut off a hunk while it was still in the fridge and it exploded violently, more like safety glass than a foodstuff. Shards of Rice Krispy glass flew in every direction. I later found them in the refrigerator drawers, in the butter tray, on the floor... I'm surprised that some of them didn't embed themselves in the ceiling.

I don't know if that qualifies me for the show, but it's still pretty shameful. I can't even blame alcoholic beverage or heavy metal music for it.

It's On

It's official. I signed off the consent forms and the doctor signed off my treatment plan, so the transplant officially starts Monday morning. I won't get the actual transplant until Tuesday, because Monday we'll be destroying my bone marrow.

It's kind of ominous. The risk of complications and mortality are pretty low, but this isn't a flu vaccination. This is Serious Stuff and it kind of scares me. It doesn't scare me enough to back out, but it still has to be taken seriously. For one thing, it'll reset my immune system to Day Zero. I'll lose all my acquired immunity to everything, so I'll need to be vaccinated against even childhood diseases, and a lifetime spend accumulating antibodies against colds will be lost. Plus there's the simple observation that any chemo powerful enough to kill my bone marrow is likely to make me feel like crap for a while.

The next sixty days are liable to be fairly unpleasant, but the sooner I start, the sooner I can finish. That's the idea I'm trying to hang on to, not the idea of sixty days of feeling bad.

Scary. I'm at a loss for words. But won't it be nice to not have cancer any more?

All Bets Are Off

My medical gurus, in between bouts of levitation, chanting and incense-burning, have decided that I do not require a supplemental round of chemotherapy before the transplants begin. Some radiation, but not chemo. Instead, I go in Monday to discuss "transplant options" with the hospital staff. I wonder what that means. Does it mean I get a choice of what organs are transplanted? Can I have, say, George Clooney's face or Robert Irvine's arms? What would happen if I got LeBron James's right leg? It would be really hard to get around; with one really long leg and one normal leg, I'd constantly walk in circles and eventually wear a ring-shaped hole in the carpet.

No, I think they're just going to discuss timing, and the sooner the better, as far as I'm concerned. I wasn't honestly looking forward to a "placeholder" course of ESHAP anyway. If I'm going to have chemo, why not make it the scorched-earth chemo associated with the transplant and have done with it? It's like drinking Jaegermeifter (yes, I know it's Jaegermeister, but before the German alphabet was rationalized, gothic S characters looked like Fs) - the sooner you start, the sooner it's over with.

I guess I'll find out Monday. Further bulletins as events warrant.

601

This is my six hundred and first post. That's a lot of posts. What would Saint Inez think about that?

Curse of the Pharoahs

They say* that Howard Carter, the man who discovered Tutankhamun's tomb, died as a result of a curse placed on the tomb by ancient Egyptian priests. Or ancient Egyptian mummies. Or the Pharoahs themselves. Or maybe it was something Zahi Hawass, head of the Supreme Council of Antiquities, did himself. I don't know; the point is that someone put a curse on the tomb dooming its discoverer to some sort of gruesome demise.

Turns out that Howard Carter died of Hodgkin's Lymphoma, the same disease I have. So I wonder what my personal connection to Egypt and/or Tutankhamun might be that I came down with this. After all, I've never been to Egypt. I didn't see the King Tut traveling exhibition. My only real connection to Egypt and mummies is that I've seen practically every mummy movie ever made. Sue me already, I like Brendan Fraser and Imhotep the mummy, waddling around the countryside in lumbering search of tanna leaves, fresh Ace bandages, or princess Ankhesunamen, or whatever her name was (doubtless she was known to her friends as Top Ramen). Is that enough to qualify me for the Curse of the Pharoahs, or am I just a victim of collateral damage? I once made a model of a T-34/85 tank in Egyptian markings; could it have been that? Or was it that Revell 1/32nd scale MiG-21, which I also finished in Egyptian markings? A plastic tank and a plastic airplane don't seem nearly weighty enough to trigger a centuries-old curse, but maybe I underestimate the power of high-impact styrene plastic (much as I underestimate the power of the Dark Side of The Force).

Maybe I should ask John Carpenter. After all, he once made a movie (Prince of Darkness) whose main antagonist was a vat of mint-flavored Liquid Satan. If he can make Liquid Satan into a viable movie villain, surely he would have some sort of insight into how I got tagged by the Curse of the Pharoahs.

* They really do

Workday

I went to work today. I didn't manage to work a whole day - nine hours. But I didn't do too badly; I managed seven hours before I got so tired I was getting to the point that I wasn't entirely safe driving an automobile. And oh my, is work ever backed up! I don't know how long I'll be able to keep working - that depends on what the doctors decide to do to me. But I'll do it as long as I can; it's fun to get out of the house.

When I got home tonight I took a brief (and unintentional) nap and woke up in the middle of what I believe to be the worst movie ever made. Redline. It's awful. It's awful in every way. It's so awful I have a hard time looking away from it in all its crass, exploitative glory. I do, however, have to mute it immediately, inasmuch as I have absolutely no appetite for rap music at all. Not even a little. Kids today mock the music I listen to (that is, emotionally overwrought Scandinavian death metal) but on what basis?

Ach! Rap-musik! Jugend heute!

CVL

A view of my Borg implant. Every day I have to pump 3 ml of Heparin and saline into each of the three lines, and twice a week I have to replace the blue tips. The red and blue lines are easy but for some reason the white one always sticks. I have to get two pairs of pliers to break it loose, which makes me feel a bit like I'm a rusty old tractor. A little Liquid Wrench, some torch heat, and a pair of Vise-Grips and I'm good to go.

The central line enters my skin in the middle of the dressing, just under the white circle. Now and then it itches like the dickens, but at least it doesn't hurt. My port, on the other hand, is on the other side of my chest in almost exactly the same spot. It isn't visible except as a date-sized swelling under my skin (the skin over my port has been penetrated with those L-shaped chemo needles so many times it's taken on a permanent purplish hue, sort of like a hickey in a weird spot). Now that they've got tubes down both of my jugular veins, I don't think there's much more they can do to me tube-wise. Oh, I shouldn't tempt fate or pretty soon I'll have a catheter in my bladder too.

The hospital gave me a plastic urinal and a couple of plastic jugs. One of these days I'm supposed to collect a whole day's worth of urine for their analytical delectation. I'm strongly tempted to buy a case or two of the cheapest, nastiest beer I can find so when urine collection day comes, I can present them with two jugs of the nastiest, foamiest beer pee known to man.

Would I really present them with such offensive matter? They're only trying to help, after all. All I can say is that going through ESHAP chemo will make even a meek person vengeful, and the fact that I'm currently listening to black metal (Mayhem, De Mysteriis Dom Sathanas) isn't helping either. Maybe come urine collection day I should listen to an hour of Alan Parsons Project to anesthetize my instinct for revenge.

The Persener

I was watching a movie on AMC last night and noted that AMC is advertizing the hell out of the remake of The Prisoner. This'll probably blow my geek credentials to hell, but I have to come out of the closet and confess that I never liked The Prisoner.

Oh, I tried. I watched the show. I read the treatises on the symbolism of the bicycle-and-umbrella logo. I listened to the learned elders at science fiction conventions explain why The Prisoner was the most amazingly important TV show ever produced. But in the end, I had to admit that I had more fun watching re-runs of Daktari than The Prisoner. It made no sense, it seemed intentionally obtuse, and nothing ever seemed to happen. Compare this to Daktari, where stuff happened, animals were patched up, lions menaced the vets, and there was plenty of footage of specially-equipped Land Rovers driving across the Serengeti. Compare this to The Prisoner, where all you really get is a lot of formlessly portentious dialogue, enormous beach balls, and a sense of slowly-building ennui that eventually drives one to exclaim This is bullshit! This is overwrought bullshit!

Here's a thought. I never liked Doctor Who either, but I preferred it over The Prisoner.

Now that I'm out of the geek closet, I feel better.

Random Thoughts

Wouldn't it be amusing if all the people who obsessively use kosher salt because they think iodized salt has a funny aftertaste developed enormous goiters?

Do you think when Arnold Schwarzeneggar was oiled up and posing for a movie camera and uttering his famous line Get to de choppa that he had any inkling that he would in the fullness of time become the Governor of California? Or that as a budding young bodybuilder in Austria that he had any inkling that he would in time be oiled up and posing for a movie camera while uttering Get to de choppa? I can't decide if this represents some kind of deep circularity or if it's just stupid.

(The other day I was browsing the HobbyLink Japan website (www.hlj.com) and I saw they actually used the line Get to de choppa! You have a love a company that'll do that. HobbyLink Japan, by the way, is the source for weird, wild and wonderful hobby products from Japan. There's a link on their website ominously labeled "Japan Culture", but having sworn off anime and manga cold turkey, I fear to click on it.)

I would write more but, to your great relief, I'm going to stop because I have a splitting heache. Finally, an ailment I can't blame on chemo! This headache is mine, I tell you, MINE! It isn't the result of intercalated DNA or alkylated base-pairs or severely disturbed microtubule production; it's something I did to myself by drinking too much coffee this morning. For that reason, I'm kind of fond of it. Compared to the bilious retching nausea, endless diarrhea and aggravating neuropathy of chemo, it's like a visit from an old friend. An old friend with poor hygiene and annoying habits, but an old friend nevertheless.

Vents

I learned from the movie Big Trouble in Little China that the Chinese have a lot of hells. The Hell of the Upside-Down Swimmers, the Hell of Being Boiled Alive, and so forth. Maybe I shouldn't trust movies so much. The movie might not be such an authentic guide to Chinese culture, considering that at one point it has a Japanese guy, speaking Japanese, pretending to be a Chinese guy speaking Chinese. That's fair to moderately shameful, unless John Carpenter is trying to tell us something.

But let's pretend that the Chinese have a lot of hells anyway. To them must be added a new one, the Hell of Really Early Morning Paid Programming. I woke up this morning well before dawn and ended up staring listlessly at the TV as spasms racked my esophagus (apparently another treat brought to me by chemotherapy, a conclusion I reach because the spasms started the same time chemo started). First it was a bunch of commercials for various forms of make-up, all of which made really quite remarkable claims. This stuff will do everything! It'll cover your acne! It'll cover your unsightly gunshot wound scars! It'll transform your life! It'll inhibit beta decay in the atomic nucleus! It'll reverse aging and raise the dead! It'll make you an even more vapid narcissist than you were before! Then it was a bunch of commercials for various weight loss programs, all of which made really quite remarkable claims. This program will do everything! It'll make (make, mind you; we're not fooling around here) you lose weight! It'll give you a better hairstyle! It'll make you taller! It'll give you better taste in clothing! It'll turn you into what Jesse The Body Ventura once called a sexual Tyrannosaurus! Then it was a food processor gadget, which made really quite remarkable claims. It'll make a hyooge salad in just 38 milliseconds! It'll solve Fermat's Last Theorem without recourse to the modularity conjecture! It'll convert some rubbery, nasty organism we found in a brackish tidepool into something you'd actually want to eat! It'll warm the hearts of crotchety old farts and make you into a culinary hero!

I don't really like olive oil. I live in mortal terror of a cooking show where they cook asparagus and some icky bivalve in a bunch of olive oil. Ugh. Why not put a few road apples and cow pies in there too while you're at it?

Subaru. Love. Yes, I do. I love the commercial where Action Executive picks up the cabbie and proceeds to turn some quiet residential street into his own private race track, startling the cabbie at first before pleasing him. I'd like to see the residents come out of their dwellings, shoot out the tires, and then beat Action Executive to death with rolling pins and hockey sticks. That'll teach you to endanger everyone by treating our quiet residential street as your own private test track, you pompous yuppie bastard. Maybe next time you'll slow down! There won't be a next time, of course, because they've beaten him to death, but you get my drift. (Maybe they should offer an Action Executive action figure. One hand could be specially molded to grip his Action Executive Blackberry; the other to grip his Action Executive Enormous Genitals. Then they could sell a cowboy action figure who could sit on a fence and roll his eyes at the stupendous self-absorption of Action Executive.)

Every now and then the Barefoot Contessa gets around to a show where she says something like "I know my friend is having a hard day, so I thought I'd make him dinner." His "hard day" happens to consist of having to deliver two orders for cut flowers, which doesn't seem all that hard to me. Why doesn't she have friends who have hard days on the order of working a twelve-hour shift in a steel mill? Because there aren't any steel mills in the Hamptons, I guess. The Hamptons must be wildly posh if delivering two batches of flowers counts as a hard day. Heaven forbid anyone should stub their toe; the whole fricking neighborhood would show up with hot dishes to console the poor bastard. How come Ina Garten doesn't cook for me when I'm having a hard day, such as Day Four of a brutal five-day chemotherapy course? Huh?? How about some home-made macaroni and cheese for me, huh? Oh, never mind; she'd just put arthropods in it and ruin it for me anyway.

Or the commercials that depict ordinary things as tasks of almost insuperable difficulty; I always like those. The woman who collapses in exhaustion after peeling three and a half potatoes. Nobody is saying that peeling potatoes is fun, but gee whiz, lady, if peeling three and a half potatoes pushes you to the breaking point, you may need to toughen up just a bit. Or the woman who has a conniption fit because the strain of taking one birth control pill a day crushes her soul and causes the sound track of her life to warble. The poor dear. What if she had to take two pills a day, or flush her central venous line once a day? Is brushing her teeth once a day too much for her too? If so, maybe they should invent a ring that goes in her mouth and bleaches her teeth.

I saw an infomercial for some make-up product called "Meaningful Beauty." What the hell does that mean? Does that mean that all this time we've been pursuing Meaningless Beauty? And what exactly does a "beauty consultant" do? Sit at a desk and look at photographs of things and decide if they're beautiful or not? "Landfill? Not beautiful. Snow-covered mountains? Beautiful. New Jersey? Iffy either way." How does one get that gig?

Last night I watched Good Eats and actually saw Alton Brown use an old-style oil can to squirt some olive oil into a pan. That's just a tad too precious, even for me. He always makes a tedious amateur thespian production out of his rants about uni-taskers, but there he is putting olive oil in a goddamned oil pump can, which is a uni-tasker if I've ever seen one (unless he puts a little thirty-weight in the same can to oil bike chains and the Tin Man when I'm not watching, which I doubt).

Oh, look, another cooking show with the "elite dinner party" theme, showing all these elite stylish people eating elite stylish food and drinking elite stylish wine while the host holds forth on the elite stylishness of the stuff he cooked. How come they never do cooking shows about a bunch of people eating chili dogs while watching a rodeo on TV? Because there aren't any rodeos in Beverly Hills, Napa Valley, or the Hamptons, I guess - let alone chili dogs. The elite food police have special equipment that can detect the characteristic sound of cans of chili being opened, and then they break down your door and send you to a food re-education camp until you admit that, yes, truffle oil really is next to Godliness.

I think my blood sugar must be low. Time to go get out the oil can, some arthropods, and the magical TV food processor and make breakfast, because delivering all these flowers is really going to hurt.

More Chemo

The results of my most recent PET scan are in, and they are mixed. I still have two active, cancerous nodes. One is less active than the last time; one is slightly more active than the last time. Not larger - they're all much smaller than they were. But active.

My doctors believe that it would be best to have more chemo before the transplant attempt; they want the cancerous nodes as dead as possible before swinging the Big Hammer at them. Fair enough, but it seems somehow predictable that just as I was starting to feel pretty good I'd have to go back under chemo. (Various people use various words to describe this. Some "take" chemo. Some are "on" chemo. Some "do" chemo. For me, "under" chemo seems the most accurate, capturing as it does the sense of having something heavy weighing one down.)

I don't know which sort of chemo yet. Surely not ABVD, since I already did that. I hope not ESHAP, which has proven in my case to be pretty effective but also pretty destructive. It takes me weeks to get over ESHAP in any meaningful way, and I'm not looking forward to losing all the strength I've gained back to another round of ESHAP. But I'm not a doctor, and if they think ESHAP is best, well, I guess that's what we'll do. But I don't have to be happy about it.

Last evening the neighbor's miniature dachshund ran away from home. As a small dog like that would be little more than a snack to the area coyotes, we turned out to help in the search. I wandered around out in the desert with a large flashlight for a meaningfully long time before I got tired, and even then, I didn't get mortally tired, I just sort of ran out of juice. It was nice to be able to do that, and to know that even though I could wear myself out, I wasn't pushing the edge of passing out. But now I'll have to do more ESHAP and I'll be right back in the same boat, bedbound and so weak that a walk to the water cooler is more work than I can manage.

Oh well. One does as one must.

PS: After everyone had given up the search, the little dog came home on his own, thirsty and dusty from his big adventure but unharmed.

Contrast Medium

I had my PET scan last week. It was actually a combined PET/CT scan, now my third. They want you to drink contrast medium to help visualize the intestines, and you actually have to drink quite a bit of it. They say "two cups" but the cups are the size of McDonalds milk shakes, so when you're trying to get the second one down, it feels more like two quarts.

My old oncology clinic made me drink this nasty white stuff that had about the consistency of 90 weight gear oil. At first the light blueberry flavor tastes pretty good, but the stuff is slimy and nasty and in the end the blueberry flavor becomes unpleasant. It takes some work to chug that stuff down, and it isn't always inclined to stay down, if you know what I mean.

The stuff at the hospital is different. It looks like, and for all the world tastes like, extremely weak strawberry-flavored Koolaid. It's easier to drink that the gooey stuff from the oncology clinic, but much messier on its way out of my system. Machs nichts, I guess - it's all ugly, just ugly in different ways.

My wife tells the story of when she and the kids were driving through South Dakota looking for the Badlands and they stopped to ask a highway department employee where the Badlands were. "Lady, it's all bad land," was his laconic reply. Quite. It's all bad land; the only question is whether it's going to be bad up front or later on.

Lately I've been having troubled dreams about an ugly brown Oldsmobile 98 with no visible driver trying to run me over. I don't think you have to be Freud to figure out what that dream means, but it does highlight the fact that my body has recovered from chemo sufficiently that I can at last actually achieve REM sleep. For several weeks I couldn't sleep for more than about ten minutes at a time, and that's not hyperbole, that's the actual fact. It's difficult to get much of a dream going on in ten minutes and the REM deprivation reaches the point that you'll do anything to knock yourself out for a while, including drinking half a bottle of Old Grand Dad. At least these days I'm not half-crazed by REM deprivation. I'm just half-crazed by dreams of ugly brown Oldsmobiles.

It's all bad land.

Flushing The Line

I have to flush my central venous line every day. I got some new syringes preloaded with the right heparin-saline mix so it's actually pretty easy to do in a technical sense. A little rubbing with some alcohol swabs, connect up the syringes, and squirt away.

But it's hard psychologically. There's always a lot of air in my tubes - they're clear and the bubbles and voids are easy to see. There's no good way to get the air out, so I have to push it in, and it takes a bit of willpower to knowingly depress the plunger and watch all that air go straight into my circulatory system. I'm told that it takes an awful lot of air in the bloodstream to cause any particular problems, but still, every time I do it I can't help but think of air embolisms and The Bends - not to mention worry if somehow an errant cat hair got into the works and is going to go on a cruise around my circulatory system for a while.

It doesn't help that practically every time I flush my line I come down with a dull headache. What could be causing that? Air? The heparin? Stress? Maybe I don't want to know.

But all of this leaves me in possession of approximately 90 preloaded syringes, and about 120 clean, empty syringes. I'm trying to figure out a way to use them in home repair or craft projects. Maybe built some quasi-Egyptian water pump out of 100 syringes and a wooden crankshaft. There has to be some use for them. (None of them come with steel needles, just the goofy thick plastic "safety needles" whose chief function seems to be to squirt heparin into my eye when I try to express the air bubbles, so I can't actually use them for any injection-related purposes.)

I had my PET scan last week and will presumably get the results this week. I can still feel a lump in my groin so I'm still at Stage I at least. I knew it was too much to expect for the ESHAP chemotherapy to have cured me. According to the statistics I read, it does have a small chance of effecting a complete cure, emphasis on small. And of course, it proved to be too much to hope for that I would have fallen into that small chance.

But I'm plagued by a different problem today. I have three USB thumb drives that I keep various documents, pictures and other geedunkery on. When I got my new computer I consciously put the thumb drives in a safe place, so if the worst happened and the transfer of my junk from one computer to the other went south, I'd at least have the thumb drives to fall back on. Trouble is, I can't remember where I put them. Oh, it's a safe place, all right, so safe I can't find, and don't think I haven't looked. I have a very vivid memory of having seem them only a couple of weeks ago, but the memory does not come with location information. It could have been on Mars for all I can remember. I think it was in the garage, but that doesn't make any sense either, as the garage isn't a particularly safe environment for electronic devices.

But hey, it's still more fun than watching The Next Iron Chef. I've come to detest that show with a heartiness that I'm sure isn't healthy, and is probably immoral to boot. It even colors my perception of Alton Brown - he seemed like he would have enough sense to steer clear of such a train wreck, but there he is, in it up to his elbows, as culpable for that mess as the rest of them. The only thing worse is Chopped, which to my mind has become stranger and even less palatable with its new season. I guess it's endless repeats of Barefoot Contessa and Tyler's Ultimate for me, and you know what? I'm okay with that.

In The Bank

I have about 5.2 million stem cells in the blood bank right now. I only needed 4 million, but I'm apparently a rich source of the little bastards, since in two sessions of apheresis I produced 5.2 million. Better too many than not because, because apheresis isn't much fun.

It doesn't hurt in any way, but you have to lie relatively still for four hours. Any movement, any coughing, even arm movements unsettle the apheresis machine, which sets up a horrid beeping sound and grinds to a halt. Until I figured that out, I ran the poor med tech guy crazy getting the machine up and running again.

After each session I got extremely wobbly and unsteady, not to mention extremely nauseated. Apheresis may not hurt, but it isn't without consequences. The guy who runs the street sweeper in the hospital parking garage who had to clean up after me can vouch for at that consequence.

But my cells are banked, and now things can slow down a little bit. We had to move extremely quickly to get me ready to harvest stem cells within a few days of my last ESHAP chemo treatment, but now that we have the cells in hand, the time pressure lets off. In fact, it lets off considerably - I hate to jinx myself, but I can't feel a single cancerous node, not even the two that were left over in my groin after the ABVD chemo.

An open appeal: when I go into the hospital for the transplant grande, I would appreciate anyone who reads this to smuggle me in some paper packets of salt and pepper. I had hospital lunches Thursday and Friday, and they had all the makings of nice meals. One was a baked pasta dish with vegetables; the other beef stew and a reasonably flaky biscuit. Unfortunately, neither dish had ever heard of salt or pepper, let alone had any sprinkled on them, so even though they were well made and as palatable as they could be under the circumstances, I'd have given my shoes for some salt.

Pineapple Juice

I went to the hospital yesterday to have my Hickman line installed. The chemo, however, had devastated my platelet count and my blood was hardly clotting at all - I had a constant low-grade nosebleed and my arms were slowly being covered by livid red subcutaneous bleeds. Before they would install my new line, I had to have a transfusion of platelets. It turns out that a bag of platelets looks a lot like pineapple juice, only it's somewhat more gooey and sticky. But, with the platelets in, the doctors installed the line, and now I have more plastic in me than a cheap Chinese radio.

All we're waiting on now is for the Neupogen to boost my stem cell count so we can have a good harvest. Maybe tomorrow, maybe the day after, maybe in a few days, but soon, either way. And then I can stop taking Neupogen, which makes my bones hurt. That will be a happy day for me!

That's Done

The second round of ESHAP chemo is done, and it was... well, bad. I expected it to be bad, and it didn't disappoint. The Vesuvian diarrhea that could well have killed Pliny the Elder if he wasn't already dead, the bizarre mental disturbances, the racking pain, oh yes, we had it all, plus truly delicious few days spent throwing up all of my internal organs and eroding sores in my mouth with stomach acid. I was pretty sure that I was going to want to keep that thing that looked like a pancreas, but too late, I flushed the toilet too soon. Once I took a Percocet and about thirty seconds later threw up. Not one to waste a waterlogged if perfectly useable pain pill, I strained it out with my fingers and saved it for later. This anecdote may lack the clear coherence and drama of Caesar's dispatches from Gaul, but it's the best I could do given my circumstances.

Does anyone know what a pancreas looks like? My understanding of what innards look like comes from the old Visible Human model, where I think with reasonable artistic license I painted the pancreas sort of a pale yellow color. In practice, I imagine most internal organs look reddish, gristly, and unappealing.

Now that I'm starting to recover from chemo, I'm fricking starving, but not very much sounds very good yet. Other than a couple of oranges and some bottles of Ensure, I haven't eaten much of anything in a week. I'm tired of the overly rich chocolate flavor of Ensure and sometimes when you're on chemo it has a peculiar slimy consistency that is most unappealing, but I found that if I didn't drink an Ensure once a day, I tended to get really weak and lightheaded.

Here's a statement from the Surgeon-General: taking a pain pill again that you've already thrown up once will produce an aftertaste in your mouth that will crush your soul for weeks.

So back to my point. What should I eat now that I think I actually CAN eat a little bit? There's a little store in our non-town of 400 people or so that sells a variety of halfway decent food. The store is a wreck and the customers are usually unwashed and extremely fidgety people who I usually suspect have been partaking in controlled substances, but the food isn't bad - just don't think very hard about it. Bizarrely, inexplicably, the fish and chips sounds good. Why?

The last thing I ate before I got really sick was a fish sandwich from Burger King. Maybe my body is clinging to that last halfway pleasant memory and thinks that if I have fish again, things will be better. Actually, the last thing I ate was half of a turkey wrap my mom brought to me at the chemo clinic, but I was past the point of really being able to eat anything by then. The idea of eating a tortilla right now fills me with a kind of strange terror.

Yes, Virginia, there were mental disturbances! I became convinced that I had two colons, and that if I could only get the right one to properly void, everything would be better. Every time I went to the bathroom I kept hoping the right one would let go, but it was always the left one (even though I'd built the Visible Human model and knew that humans only had one knobbly pale blue-purple colon). At one point the third Brendan Fraser mummy movie was blaring at me (a loud, disappointing mess that was, too) and I was trying to turn down the volume, and after failing for quite some time I realized that I was gripping my left wrist in my right hand and attempting to turn down the volume with one of the small bones in my wrist (the Visible Human model was not detailed enough for me to attempt an identification). I also became convinced that Elmo the little dog wasn't really Elmo the little dog. Beats me who he was at the time, I just didn't think he was really Elmo (though since all Elmo really does is sleep and want to drink out of my water glass, he's easy to impersonate).

Day Four

Day Four is in the books and boy am I ever sick. I'm wearing a transderman patch for nausea, and I got intravenous Aloxi for nausea this morning, and the nausea is still intense. And it isn't even over; I have one more day to go, though tomorrow I don't get etopacide or cisplatin; tomorrow I get cytabarine or whatever it is. I can't remember. The chemo is causing a market fuzziness of thought and I'm having trouble with words. This to me is one of the most disturbing aspects of chemo. I know the nausea and diarrhea and whatnot will eventually go away, but this strange feeling of slowly losing my mind is scary. I hate the feeling that comes over me when I try to read something as simple as a magazine article and I have to put it down because the words become confusing and almost threatening.

They say that come Monday I'll be transferred to the care of the transplant team. Things are going to start happening with considerable speed, I think, though I personally don't know what the schedule is yet.

But for now, I'm going to take a compazine and a percocet and try to sleep.

Where The Last Wave Broke

I was goofing around on iTunes tonight, mainly checking to see if the new Insomnium album Across the Dark might be available by chance, and instead found a new three-song EP called Where The Last Wave Broke. What giveth, dudes? I find nothing on their website about this EP, so it's something of an enigma to me. Where did it come from, and why?

Still, I'm not complaining; new Insomnium, even if it is enigmatic, is better than no new Insomnium. Musically, the three songs all sound like they came from three different epochs in the band's development, making me wonder if they weren't demos or trial runs that never made it onto their actual releases. I like the sound of "Into The Evernight" in particular, though the drums seem to have about fallen out of the bottom of the song. It also reprises chunks of an earlier Insomnium song, but in a fairly tasteful way that doesn't automatically put me in mind of recyling.

Day Two

Day Two of ESHAP chemotherapy is in the books, and do I feel like crap? Let me count the ways!

We gots nausea. We gots whole-body ache as though I've got the flu again. My hands shake. My diarhhea is growing significantly worse again. I'm about as tired as that nameless Greek who ran all the way from Marathon before allegedly dropping dead. The usual, in other words, no better and no worse than I expected.

But here's the fun part: I'm already starting to have strange mental symptoms. My wife bought me from frozen chimichangas (yes, heresy to the foodies, but I like them) and told me they were in the refrigerator. I started looking for them and couldn't find them, even though they were right in front of my eyes - as near as I can recollect matters, I was looking for something that looked like eggplants, not chimichangas.

The last time I went through ESHAP I developed several bizarre mental aberrations that lasted for days. I couldn't turn to the left. If I wanted to turn to the left, I had to turn 270 degrees to the right. It wasn't that something said "No, you can't turn to the left." It was more the case that I had forgotten that I had a left side at all. All directions to me were right, in the same way that at the North Pole, all directions are south. I also developed the strange idea that Bobby Flay and I were sharing a communal digestive tract and that every time I had to bolt to the bathroom, it was to equalize pressure with Bobby Flay's part of the digestive tract (that is, is was all his damn fault. Sorry, Bobby). These weren't dreams, these were bizarre mental fixations that lasted for several days. (I also lost the ability to read but didn't realize it for a while).

This time, I was lying in bed last night, trying to sleep, when I suddenly and quite consciously became convinced that my skin had detached from my body in a single sheet and had adhered to the sheets. Only by lying in a specific way and pulling the covers up just so could I realign my skin so it would reattach itself to my body.

I have to say, chemo is pretty bad, but these strange Lovecraftian touches are kind of amusing and interesting, at least by the light of day.

Maldiction!

I got a call at 4:15 Friday afternoon that I am supposed to show up for round two of ESHAP chemotherapy at 9:00 Monday morning. Am I alone in regarding this as desperately short notice? Now I have to call work with basically no advance warning at all and tell them that I won't be working at all next week, which I'm sure will go over extremely well indeed. Sigh.

And since the ducks are not properly aligned for the stem cell harvest to take place, this is going to be a "placeholder" chemo. The plan was to do the harvest a few days after the chemo, but I don't have a cost contract from the hospital yet, I haven't had my Hickman line installed, and things just aren't ready, so I'm probably going to have to wait till the third chemo for the stem cell transplant to begin. Sigh. Again.

ESHAP made me feel so bad the last time that the prospect of having to go through it three times instead of just two fills me with an urge to blurt a long series of bad words. A while back we went to the Mexican Riviera on vacation (somewhere south of Playa del Carmen, but I forget the name of the resort) where my nephew and I shared a hotel room. One night we watched Kill Bill on cable. I think it was Kill Bill. I don't honestly remember. But whatever it was, it was in English with Spanish subtitles, and there was a lot of cussing in the movie. Every time someone in the movie wound up and spat out a meaningless empty curse, usually of the reproductive sort, the subtitle merely read Maldiction! That means "bad word", doesn't it?

So here I am, reviewing my limited options, and muttering maldiction! Maldiction! Oh, maldiction!

How Unsavory

I watched The Next Iron Chef the other night. I didn't really want to, but there wasn't much else on TV and since I seem to be suffering from a serious cold on top of everything else, I couldn't just close my eyes and sleep - attempts to sleep are punished by the gods with fits of coughing that leave me trembling and light-headed.

So I watched it, and I didn't like it. I don't think much of "competitive cookings shows" in general, and I cringe when the "competitors" say things like "If someone comes after me, I'll go right back at them." It would be different if now and then the "competitors" really went at one another with Chinese cleavers, or even especially robust bunches of celery, but come on, you're making a broth here, not duking it out with Ivan Klitchko.

But the producers made the show many orders of magnitude more unappetizing by choosing insalubrious ingredients. Grasshoppers? Unlaid eggs and chicken fallopian tubes? Sea cucumbers? I know they were testing the "fearlessness" of the cooks, err, I mean, "competitors", but what's the point of cooking something that most people won't eat?

I didn't like it, and I won't watch another one. They had one chance to win me, and what did they do? They sprayed me with ingredients that as far as I'm concerned are garbage, not food. A pox upon the whole thing.

Sunday Night

I was going to shave my hair today, but I just never got around to it. My hair and moustache are getting skimpy enough that they would be better off shaved, but I just never seemed to have the energy. Chemotherapy is the gift that keeps on giving, in that respect at least.

I was also going to give my little dog (the Blawg Dawg) a haircut, but I never got around to that either. She's getting awfully scruffy, but she doesn't care. Nothing dampens her mood; she's just as happy sitting in a cold mud puddle as she is sleeping on a folded-up blanket at the foot of the bed. I'm trying to learn from her example, though I confess that after a year of cancer and chemotherapy I feel, in the words of Bilbo Baggins, "Thin, like butter scraped across too much bread."

My nephew got married yesterday. How often does your nephew get married? Not often, and I wanted to go, but chemo makes one unfit for public appearances. Suffice it to say that I just couldn't go, but I felt guilty about it all day.

Afghanistan

Today I take keyboard in hand to talk a little bit about all the recent palaver about the war in Afghanistan. Specifically, I heard on NPR the other day some Democratic politician saying that we had no more business being in Afghanistan than we had being in Vietnam. I'm a Democrat and all, but I support the war in Afghanistan and think that comparisons between Afghanistan and Vietnam are invalid.

VIETNAM: Why you think we got involved in Vietnam depends to an extent on your political philosophy. Was it commercial interests? Were we bailing out the French? Were we truly worried about Communist expansion? Was it all the Domino Theory? Either way, a Communist Vietnam never posed a threat to the United States. Uncle Ho never seemed inclined to carry out terrorist attacks in the United States, and the Domino Theory was in any event proven to be largely false.

AFGHANISTAN: Here we are fighting against a religio-political movement that hosted Osama bin Laden, that continues to host him, that supports social and political "reforms" that anyone in the West must surely find repellent. They probably also provided material aid to al Qaeda when they were planning the attacks on New York, the Pentagon, the Embassies in Africa, the USS Cole and so forth.

It strikes me that we had no compelling reason to become involved in Vietnam. It blew up out of the larger Cold War (my wife would probably refer to it as a "penis-measuring contest") and had no larger ramifications. Indeed, thirty years on, the grip of Communism on Vietnam is failing and one could reasonably argue that though we technically lost the shooting war, we are going to win the larger cultural and social war in the long run.

But Afghanistan? Let's remember who the enemy in Afghanistan is. This isn't some Cold War contretemps being fought out for the sake of doctrinaires; this is a real war against an enemy that struck us first. It seems to me that there are no parallels between Vietnam and Afghanistan, except the obvious one that both involve young men dying before their time.

It seemed a pity to me at the time, and an even greater pity now, that we (meaning President Bush and his team) allowed Iraq to distract us from the main mission in Afghanistan. If we had piled those 120,000 troops we sent to Iraq into Afghanistan on top of what we already had there, we wouldn't be having this conversation today.

Afghanistan is a mess and no mistake, and I can't say I know exactly what should be done. But I don't think that crying "Vietnam!" and throwing our hands up is the right answer. What would I do? I'd commit the 101st Airborne and a full infantry division of the US Army to the theater and see what happens.

No News

There's no real news on the stem cell transplant front. I called them to see if they are waiting for me to do something and they haven't returned my call, bu as far as I know we're just waiting for things to fall into place (HP Lovecraft might say that we're waiting for the stars to return to an ancient configuration, which may be appropriate because this super-chemo may be about as dreadful as a picnic on R'leyh).

Further bulletins as events warrant.

What A Relief!

I'm glad someone in the pharmaceutical industry took time out from working on drab, boring problems like malaria, MRSA, cancer vaccines and Alzheimer's and finally attended to the pressing national problem of Brooke Shields and her skimpy eyelashes.

Not that I'm doing any special pleading for a vaccine or cure for Hodgkin's (though it would be cool if there was such a thing) but on the scale of medical problems that need attending to, skimpy eyelashes must rate just about a zero, right down there with renegade nose hairs and the tendency to snort when you laugh.

The Next Iron Zombie

Does the world need another Iron Chef? I don't think so. I'm comfortable with the current assortment, and frankly I don't know who any of the potential future Iron Chefs are on the ads for The Next Iron Chef. I recognize Amanda Freitag, but that's it. The rest of them are cyphers to me, unpalatable ones at that.

But I think to a large extent it's the way the ads are filmed that puts me off the project. They're all shown in this cold, dead light that makes them look like zombies or corpses. Whose idea was that? "Hey, I got an idea, let's light them in a way that makes them look sallow, unhealthy and dead! Even Alton Brown will end up looking spooky and diseased! It'll be great!"

Yeah, great. The lighting on Dr. G Medical Examiner is more flattering than the Next Iron Chef ads. How strange it is that a TV show about a morgue seems warmer and more inviting than a show about people cooking things in a kitchen. But it could be worse - it could be Chopped, with its endless loving footage of sweat dripping off the noses of the various competitors and falling into their freakish dishes. That's appetizing.

Sleepless in Wittmann

I've had my share of sleepless nights of late, understandably enough, and one of the things I sometimes do when I can't sleep is wonder what might have happened if I'd signed on the dotted line back in 1978. Let me explain. Back in 1978, when I was a senior in high school, I had every intention of joining the US Army, with particular emphasis on armor - tanks, that is.

My family doesn't have a particularly rich military tradition. My dad was drafted into the US Army in World War Two and though he remained intensely proud of his service in what he called "The Big One", he was demobilized along with practically everyone else and was back in civilian life by the time of the Korean War. My grandfather served as a Seabee on Guadalcanal and throughout the South Pacific, but was never the most military of men - nor did he really want to be; I think he found the various challenges of building airstrips and bases on jungle islands fascinating, but the military life itself didn't mean much to him.

So I didn't have a long history of forebears pushing me to join the Army. Mostly I succumbed to an extremely slick recruiting film I saw at the US Army recruiter. My dad and grampa did a lot of work with bulldozers when I was a kid, so I was sort predisposed to have an appreciation for heavy tracked vehicles. But that recruiting film, oh my! The front line tank of the day was the M60A1, a vehicle that doesn't get nearly as much credit as it deserves, and the film was full of M60s in action - high speed turns, firing at target tanks at Fort Irwin, accelerating across the desert amid clouds of dust and diesel smoke...

So I had it all figured out. I'd join the US Army and serve in an armored division in Europe, preferably one equipped with M60A2s, a highly unconventional vehicle whose nickname "Starship" did a good job of reflecting the tank's high sophisticated technical nature. Unfortunately, the 152mm Shillelagh gun/missile system was not a spectacular success and once the Army figured out that a 105mm-armed M60A1 was as efficient in an anti-tank role as the M60A2, most M60A2s were converted to M60A3s or into engineering vehicles.

If I'd joined in 1978, I would have retired in 1998, just as the M60A3 was finally giving way to the M1 Abrams. The M60A3 TTS was an excellent tank - its thermal imaging system was better in 1990 than the most systems are even today. But the M60A3 didn't have Chobham and probably couldn't have accommodated a 120mm gun, so off it went, most of them ending up in Egypt.

Anyway, that was the plan. What would my life have been like if I had retired from the armor in 1998? There's no way of knowing, but I can't help but think that it would have been worse. Twenty years of dunderheaded second lieutenants and alcoholic NCOs would likely have driven me mad, or alcoholic, or both. I don't regret not having joined the Army. I probably wouldn't have made a very good soldier anyway and the Army might well have "accidentally" lost my re-enlistment papers in the event that I decided I could stand a second hitch.

I went through AFEES, but never signed the dotted line. It's probably a good thing. Who ever heard of a six-foot-four tanker? I probably couldn't have fit in an M60 even with no clothes and a thick layer of chicken grease on my person. I tried to climb into an ex-Soviet T55 in a park in Leningrad and found the experience laughable (and I could only conclude that the average Soviet tanker was short, wiry, and had a very high threshold of pain).

Anyway. Enough of the tanks.

Alopecia Maximus

This morning I discovered that my hair is falling out again, and falling out way faster than it ever did on the ABVD protocol. Back during ABVD I could pull on my hair and come out with six, eight, ten, maybe fifteen hairs. But today, I can pull it out by the handful. Entire shocks of hair come out. There's no pain, no sense of tension, nothing - I pull, and out comes big masses of hair.

I almost burst into tears when I made that discovery at work this morning. I expected my hair to fall out, and I'm not that attached to it anyway. It was just a reminder of how sick I really am. Pardon my language, but the CHOP protocol is fucking awful, and when your hair falls out in big wads you're reminded of how bad it really is.

I'll survive. I'm just a low ebb emotionally. I'll feel better when my hair is finally gone and I can go back to wearing my little black beanie like a proper chemotherapy patient.

Horsepital

It looks like I can take my laptop to the hospital with me, and they have a wireless presence. That'll be fun, blogging from the depths of the transplant isolation wing, but what I wonder even more is what the staff will think of Amon Amarth. There might be something a little strange about listening to death metal in a hospital room, and I intend to find out.

I'm also considering putting together a little kit so I can build the occasional model while I'm there. Nothing too spectacular, mind you. I think I've settled on a couple of older Revell models of World War One airplanes, specifically the Sopwith Triplane and the Fokker Dr.1, also a triplane. These are small and inoffensive, confronting one with neither complex assembly nor great cost, just the sort of thing to stick together with nontoxic citrus glue while listening to Amon Amarth and waiting for one's hair to fall out.

Phood Network

I watched an awful lot of the Food Network while I was sick, as is my usual wont. Here are a few of my random observations drawn from this experience.

1. Watching Chef Versus City is no fun when you're sick. Watching them force down those giant Chicago-style pizzas and threatening to blow chow while I was in turn threatening to blow chow was altogether too much. I don't care for the show much to begin with, but the forced eating and the loving close-ups of nausea-wracked faces just don't work for me.

2. I chuckle every time someone on Chopped says something like "I'm from (pick one) India China Columbia Bratislava and cooking is very important to my culture." Well, duh. Name me one culture that cooking isn't very important to. It sounds like mindless jingoism to me.

3. I have to apologize to Bobby Flay. In the past I've insisted that he's a jerk, but I think I have to retract that statement. He seems much more decent than I ever gave him credit for. I also have to say that while I like his cooking style, what with all the spices and peppers and whatnot, I wish he'd stop putting octopus in everything. Ugh.

The Old Man and the Heave

Contrary to popular myth or expectation, I'm not dead. I've just had a pretty busy couple of weeks. No, busy isn't really the right word. Unpleasant comes closer to the truth.

WEEK ONE

Here we have five days of chemo, a combination of etopacide, cisplatin, and cyto-something. I don't remember the third drug. One day of chemo isn't too unpleasant, but five days in a row? It has a way of piling up, in the same way that one day's worth of dirty laundry is nothing too harrowing, but a five-day pile of dirty laundry starts to get kind of daunting.

The chemo brought the usual run of unwelcome visitors, like fatigue and intestinal distress, but it also brought a grande-sized helping of nausea. During the ABVD protocol I did my share of vomiting, but I probably threw up more on the five days of this protocol than six months of ABVD. And it's hair-trigger vomiting too, with very little advance warning.

Five days of chemo is a lot. It's what a friend of mine used to call e-goddamned-nuff.

WEEK TWO

Now the fun really started. On the fifth day of chemo I started to get sick from something else. Nobody did any cytological studies or anything, but it was probably a virus of some sort, perhaps egged on by the disordered nature of my immune system. My symptoms began with dizziness, confusion and something akin to stupor, followed by crippling abdominal pain and the most spectacular diarrhea I've ever heard about, read about, or experienced. At times I was busily ejecting fluids from both ends of my body simultaneously and I didn't know which end would be most profitably aimed at the toilet.

For several days I couldn't even read. I was so confused and disoriented that I couldn't make sense of words on a page. I'd look at the words, they would confuse me, and I would become kind of angry. Then, as often as not, I would become nauseated.

I stopped eating and drinking, and since my body was enthusiastically jettisoning fluids from both ends, the result was severe dehydration. By Wednesday I'd gone about five days without eating anything and had lost so much water my arms, legs and face were developing a gaunt, bony aspect that I should have found more troubling than I did. We went to see the inestimable Dr. Adoo at the oncology clinic on Wednesday and I could hardly walk the fifty yards from the door to the office, and for all practical purposes I simply gave out in his examining room.

They were going to transport me to the hospital when one of the nurses (whom I affectionately but privately refer to as "Madam Hooch") had the idea of tapping into my port for rehydration. They connected me to a bag of saline the size of a North Korean and presently I began to feel better. Another thing I remember is this conversation with the doctor:

"Are you taking Imodium?"
"Yes."
"How much?"
"As much as the box instructions permit."
"Double it."

Armed with fresh fluids and a doubled intake of Imodium, I slowly began to make progress against the virus. At first I couldn't sleep for more than a half an hour at a time and I couldn't take any pills that would make me drowsy because I had to be able to get from the bed to the toilet in a matter of a few seconds. Over time I could sleep longer, the pain receded, and I slowly began to stockpile some water in my system (it felt like I was drinking several gallons of water a day, but even that probably wasn't enough).

WEEK THREE

Back to work! That was bad. After being bedridden and dehydrated for a week, my muscles just didn't seem to want to work any more. My gait devolved into a laborious shuffle that reminded me of The Carol Burnett Show and for whatever reason walking even short distances left me sweaty and winded. I lasted two hours at work the first day before I was simply overwhelmed by fatigue.

On Tuesday I was clearing out old voice mail and found two voice messages from the Banner Transplant team arranging an appointment for me at noon on Tuesday! Bugger! I tore out of work and drove like the wind to the hospital, where the only parking place I could find was about five hundred yards away from the door. I had to stop to rest several times on the way to the door, and each time reflected upon the windblown exhaustion described by Krakauer in Into Thin Air. Is this what climbing Everest is really like? None for me, thanks.

By the time I found the transplant office, I was positively reeling from exhaustion. Fortunately all I really had to do in the appointment was sit and talk. More on the appointment later.

The rest of the week I slowly got stronger. Even day I'm not fully recovered. Walking is still a struggle and I tire out with great ease, but I still seem to be getting stronger. It's taking me much longer to recover from this than normal, but then again, I've never been sick in the immediate aftermath of five days of chemo either. All bets are off, apparently.

THE TRANSPLANT

The stem cell transplant is on. I was hoping to avoid it, but there is apparently no avoiding it. I met with the transplant people at the hospital on Tuesday, where they not only accepted me into the program but described me as an almost ideal candidate: relatively young, no major underlying health problems, and a garden-variety nodular sclerosing Hodgkin's that should prove easy meat.

The great thing about the program is that they have specialists on hand to do my worrying for me. I have a case worker who is responsible for all my scheduling and appointments. I have another case worker who is responsible for getting, filing and transferring medical records. I have a social worker who worries about my emotional readiness. I have financial case workers who worry about financial matters. My job, my only job, is to bear up under the procedure and get better. That's it.

Final scheduling of the stem cell transplant is not yet fixed, but it'll probably start toward the end of this month or the middle of the next. It's a 100-day process, most of which consists of monitoring and recovery. There is a roughly two-week period before the transplant where one undergoes tests and has one's stem cells harvested (they need 4,000,000 of my stem cells for this to work, by the way). Then there is a one-month hospital stay where they do the actual high-intensity chemo and the stem cell transplant. Then the rest of the program takes place at home, where one tries to rest and avoid contagion.

This means that I had to tell my boss that I can't work for six months. The transplant people said it's sometimes as short as four months, but six months is a fairly good general-purpose guess. My boss has been very understanding about all of this and simply said "Try to let me know a week ahead when you're going to leave." It's up to me when I want to stop working; I think I'll probably stop when my second chemo starts.

Here's the general process.

1. Undergo second five-day chemo protocol
2. Begin injections of Neupogen
3. Wait for stem cell population in the blood to peak
4. Harvest 4,000,000 stem cells
5. Complete various tests
6. Go into the hospital
7. Have a week of super-intense chemo that kills practically everything in your body
8. Have the stem cells reinjected
9. Stay in the hospital till the immune system starts to recover
10. Go home and stay home till the immune system recovers
11. Begin testing to see if the cancer is finally gone
12. I guess that's about it

So it's been a fraught few weeks for me - chemo, physical illness, physical incapacity, facing the reality of being out of work for six months, and confronting the reality of the stem cell transplant. None of it much fun. No indeed.

I really have to give appreciation to Jean, my wife, who really went above and beyond the call of duty in taking care of me when I was practically incapable of doing anything. Thank you, honey!

Two Down

Thus ends day two of my new chemo regimen. Gawd.

Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday I'm under the IV drip for five to seven hours each, taking aboard a gigantic bag of epotacide and a slightly less gigantic bag of cisplatin (not to mention a dose of Lasix, an anti-emetic, and a steroid). Then I go to work for as long as I can manage.

It makes for a long day, but I guess it's nothing I can't bear in the long run, especially since it seems to be working. The pain in my back is already gone, the pain in my leg is dramatically reduced, and the swelling in my neck has already receded by about a third in only two days. I can stand a lot of suffering if it seems to be for a reason, and thus far, it seems to be for a very good reason.

So what are the main side effects so far? The most memorable is a truly vile, sour metallic taste in my mouth. It's like licking a mummified penny, only it doesn't go away. If I eat anything, I can still taste the metallic taste and think "That would be good rice if rice normally came mixed with mummified pennies." The chemo also tends to make me a bit headachy, a headache that reminds me of nitroglycerine or even Neulasta. And I'm beat. Exhausted.

Fortunately nausea doesn't seem to figure into the picture, at least not yet. That'll take five to seven days to crop up. Whee.

I'm not sure what happens Friday. I know I go in for chemo, but I get a different drug whose name escapes me. It also doesn't take five to seven hours. Further bulletins on that as I figure out the details.

Repeat for six months and hope for the cancer to just DIE.

Fashionista

I'm not much of a fashion plate. At work I tend to opt for the casual dress shirt and Docker-like slacks, and at home I'm prone to comfort clothes, chiefly shorts and western shirts that have seen a few too many years of hard service. Not that I dislike nice clothes by any means - I like dressing up as much as the next person, but I am historically very hard on clothes. I'm the sort of person who would accidentially tear a hole in a brand new shirt with a sanding drum mounted in a Dremel tool.

But compared to modern sartorial thought, I appear to be a veritable clothes horse.

I stopped the gas station the other day, and as I was waiting for the gas pump to finish impoverishing me utterly, I noticed that there were three guys at the gas station all wearing pull-on shorts. When did formless plaid pull-on shorts turn into such a hot trend? I have a pair of plaid pull-on shorts too, but they said "pajamas" on the outside of the bag.

But these three guys had more in common than just the pull-on shorts. They were all of a specific type: fat guys with shaved heads, pubic beards, muscle shirts, pull-on shorts, and flip-flops. What up with that? I think it's the pubic beard that bothers me the most. You know what I'm talking about, the scanty fringe of hair completely surrounding the mouth that makes the mouth look more like an excretory sphincter than anything else. I've worn my facial hair in a great many ways over the years, the Rhodesian moustache being one of my favorites (often called a "porn star moustache" by people who have never heard of Rhodesia) but I don't think I've ever adopted the pubic beard.

I don't even like flip-flops. Oh, they're dreadfully convenient around the house, but for some reason the presence of that rubber thing between my toes distracts me to the point of near-madness. And I hate it when the toe of the thing gets stuck under the brake pedal.

No, I think I'm perfectly happy with my western shirts and shorts with actual buttons and shoes with laces, thank you very much.

Clarification

In a previous post I said I was famously dubious of superstring theory. I am, but I am even more dubious of supersymmetry. Without supersymmetry, superstring theory fails (or one might say, fails worse).

Supersymmetry arises from complex mathetical operations in representation theory that I don't presume to understand. How I judge it by is how one should evaluate any theory of physics: how well its predictions compare with experiment. So far, not very damn well.

The real-world ramification of supersymmetry, as opposed to allegedly "elegant" manipulations of theoretical mathematics, is that for every type of particle (electron, W, Z, quarks and so forth) there must be a "supersymmetrical partner" of the opposite type. By "opposite type" I mean that for every fermion, there must be a partner boson, and for every boson there must be a partner fermion. For the electron, a fermion, there must be a boson called a "selectron". I guess that means that for the photon, a boson, there must be a fermion partner, but I don't remember what it's called. Maybe a photino. (Fermions are the constituents of matter, generally speaking, while bosons are the carriers of force, generally speaking.)

ANYWAY. The point is that supersymmetry predicts the existence of a whole bunch of particles that thus far have never been seen in nature, not in particle accelerators, not in the byproducts of cosmic ray impacts in the upper atmosphere, nowhere. Am I the only person who finds it awfully convenient that every time a particle accelerator reaches the lower edge of the presumed energy of these superpartners and never finds them, that the theory is tweaked to make the superpartners just a little more massive?

Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence, of course, but nevertheless at some point one simply has to admit that the emperor is naked. And if the supersymmetric emperor is naked, so is the superstring emperor (and the Minimally Supersymmetric Standard Model as well, but I don't like it either).

Kindled

I heartily recommend the Kindle to one and all. The books are inexpensive. The reader is easy to use and quite convenient. And best of all, it facilitates impulse-buying in a big way. I've had some trouble sleeping over the weekend and more than once found myself browing the on-line store very late at night, just seeing what looked good. Plenty, but I held the line at buying a book on the history of particle accelerators and colliders, a subject (nuclear physics in general) that I have no small amount of interest in.

The book proved to be insufficiently meaty for me - a book on particle accelerators that never even mentions the existence of synchrotron radiation is too light for me (there's a reason the Stanford Linear Accelerator is linear, but you won't learn that reason from this book). The book also mentions superstring theory (which I am famously dubious of) and the Minimally Supersymmetric Standard Model without really explaining why the results of runs at the Large Hadron Collider might be relevant to them, pro or con. (I also hoped there would be some mention of the GZK Limit and cosmic rays and the notion of Doubly-Special Relativity, but I can't really hold the absence of them from the book since they really don't have anything to do with colliders per se.)

In the end, it felt like it started out as a rebuttal of the notion that the Large Hadron Collider might produce quantum black holes or odd quark-antiquark bound pairs called "strangelets" that some theorize could end up destroying the Earth, and the rest of the book was written to flesh out the chapters that weren't about quantum black holes or strangelets.

But that isn't the Kindle's fault, by any means, and it still wasn't a bad book. It beat lying in the dark and trying not to think about the ominous and steady advance in my lymphoma symptoms. It's a good thing chemo starts up again next week, because I'm definitely going downhill again.