Kind of Odd

This has been an odd chemo outing in that I don't feel nearly as bad as I have in the past. Bad enough, mind you, but I don't feel like I've been poisoned. Today, for example, my only real complaint is that the Neulasta makes my legs and pelvis hurt. Yesterday I had one episode of severe nausea (just before lunch, natch) but otherwise, nothing. So why don't I feel worse than I do?

I have a theory.

We know that the chemo drugs preferentially kill the cells in my body that reproduce rapidly (often in the very act of reproduction, a touch right out of the Friday the Thirteenth movies where you know the first couple to have sex will be the first couple to die). These dead cells are broken down by the body's custodial workers and their various bits and pieces are put into the bloodstream for disposal. The kidneys filter the bits and pieces out and off they go, down the drain to wherever dead cancer cells go.

I theorize that the high level of cellular breakdown products in the bloodstream contributes considerably to the general feeling of slow death that comes with chemo. But as you start to run out of cancer cells to kill, there just isn't as much junk floating around in your bloodstream, and you just don't feel as bad.

There are people who would accuse me of being overly optimistic, because the basic premise of this theory is that I'm running out of cancer cells to kill, and there are people who would dismiss that as wishful thinking. And maybe it is, but I happen to like the idea that I'm running out of cancer cells. I don't like the siege mentality where you darkly suspect every quarter of your body of harboring renegade colonies of Reed-Sternberg cells; I'd rather imagine that my innards are just about squeaky-clean and cancer-free at this point. And if I have to invent bogus theories to buttress that belief, then by gum I will.

Nine-Down

I'm home from my ninth chemo treatment. I don't feel too awful. I'm tired and drained and I can already feel the Neulasta tickling my bone marrow with its cold dead fingers, but I don't feel too awful. It's too early to say, but it seems that the Zithromax they prescribed me is starting to take the sharp pulsing edge off my toothache, which at the Chinese buffet today had risen to about 11 on the pain scale. (How I wish, when the paramedics had asked me what my pain was when I was having a heart attack, that I had replied "Mine goes to eleven." But alas, "Like, ten" was all I could manage.

I filled out a "pick your top five rock guitarists" thing on Facebook today. The guitarist that I think most impresses me, and has impressed me for a very long time, is Ronnie Montrose. I find him speedy yet tasteful, technical yet artistic, and even when he's playing music that I don't really like, I'm always struck by his personal guitar schwartz. So I typed "Ronnie Montrose" into the application, and got bubkes. No Ronnie Montrose. Oh, I could add Ronnie Montrose, assuming I had a previously unpublished public domain image of him to upload... In the immortal inarticulate snort of Field Marshal Paul von Hindenburg, "Pfui!"

So I moved on to Ville Friman, one of the guitarists for Insomnium, a metal guitarist of refined taste indeed. Not crushingly heavy, and he doesn't "shred" as the hair metal people would say, but he's highly adept at that melancholic metal sound that I find more and more appealing with each passing medical emergency... Err, I mean "day". But they no more had Ville Friman than they had, say, Ronnie Montrose.

Oh, I get it now, we're supposed to pick people like Zak Wylde (spelling?) or Edward van Halen or (God save me) Slash. But come on, guys, what sort of world is it when they have Sammy Hagar (I checked) and they don't have Ronnie Montrose?? Or Chris Burney? Or James Young? Or... Oh, never mind.

Thinking about matters like this makes my chemo seem less onerous, but it isn't very instructive, is it?

No Guitar For Bonzo

Well, I think we can scratch notions of buying a guitar, at least for a few months. My so-called "insurance company" has decided not to pay for my chemotherapy. They either decided not to pay for any of it, or not to pay for more than $2000 of it, I'm a little hazy (my dark suspicion is that they will only pay for $2000 of it, but the deductible eats that up, so it amounts to "none of it"). All they ask in return for this are premiums of $1500 a month. Let me see if I understand this correctly: I pay $1500 a month, they pay $2000 a year? Something's not adding up. Oh, wait, I get it, they want to make a gigantic fucking profit, that's what the deal is.

So now I'll probably have to figure out a way of paying for not only my upcoming chemo treatments, but all the ones I've already had. Fortunately my oncologist and chemo lab are pretty flexible - they mostly roll their eyes and say "Holy shit, that's the worst insurance we've ever heard of." Roger that. I'd be better off I had not paid them a red cent and saved the $1500 a month and applied it to my own medical treatment - I pay the insurance company $1500 a month, and my chemo only costs $1400 a month. Oh, but what happens if you have to go the hospital?? Well, they only pay $5000 a year tops if you're hospitalized. Seriously, I'm missing something here.

I don't want to dwell on it too much because it makes me furious, and I don't think being furious is good for my health right now. I mean, it makes me mad enough my heart pounds and my fists ball up and I fantasize about planting my size 14s in someone's testicular region - not because they offer extremely poor coverage, but because I was stupid enough to imagine that the word "insurance" meant something. I feel a little bit like a fish that bit down on a shiny lure and all of a sudden ended up in the bottom of a fishing boat, looking up at the sky out of a single unblinking eye and wondering "What the hell just happened to me?"

Anyway. I need to calm down. My main priority now is to cure my cancer and survive my chemo, and after that, to pay my medical bills. Getting all worked up about this alleged insurance company isn't doing anything to help. Besides, I'm going to refer the matter to the State of Arizona and see if they can figure out what's going on.

Meantime, I think I'm going to have to defer things like guitars for a while, at least until I get the oncologist all paid up. If anyone in this mess really deserves to be fully paid up, I think it's the doctor who saved my life, not the insurance company that, as near as I can tell, was set up to separate me as efficiently as possible from my disposable income.

It's been so long since I last blogged I almost couldn't remember my password. That's bad either way you slice it - it either means that I haven't written a blog entry in a long time, or my memory is faulty, or both.

I vote for both. I got a little tired of blogging because it seemed that it was nothing but chemo and lymphoma all the time, and sometimes I'd just as soon not have to think about such things. Chemo sucks badly enough as it is without dwelling on every intestinal spasm or nadir of helpless fatigue. I sort of scoffed at the notion of "chemo days" when I first started out, where a "chemo day" is a day where some combination of chemo, cancer and random chance leaves you completely unfit to face the world. Well, they happen. They happen to me. Some days I'm tough and some days I just stay in bed, but since I can't avail myself of such niceties as medical leave or short-term disability, I have to work. Taint fair, I don't think, but who asked me?

This chemo cycle doesn't seem as bad as the last one, but my work has placed fairly large demands on me. In better days I would have viewed this work assignment as a pleasantly meaty challenge, but under chemo, replace "pleasantly meaty" with "almost insuperable". The point is that my chemo symptoms this cycle aren't bad, but factor in the burden of work and I'm about as bad off as I was last cycle, when the physical symptoms were really bad.

As my grandfather once said, I'd complain if they hung me with a new rope.

I'm also a little irritated with the world of music. Insomnium claims to be working on a fourth album, which is good news, but it's so far out in the future they don't have a title or any artwork for the album, and it probably won't be out until next winter - and even then, I strongly suspect that iTunes won't carry it and I'll have to do the Euros-to-dollars conversion on some record store website to buy the CD. (Do you ever wonder if my sudden whim to model much of the Finnish Air Force is motivated by my liking for the band Insomnium? I do.)

I was listening to the album Swan Song by Carcass today. It's not considered their best work, and as it was their last work, it's regarded as a disappointment by those who like the grindy Carcass of old instead of the "death and roll" Carcass of Swan Song. Those "Behind The Music" documentaries would say something like "Fans did not follow Carcass into this new territory..." And it must be said that there's nothing on Swan Song that stands up to such bidness as Corporeal Jigsore Quandary or Inpropagation or Heartwork. But having said that, I have to say that there are some songs on Swan Song that do soothe my savage breast, notably R**k The Vote and Go To Hell, the latter of which I interpret as the band's final statement to the fans that they feel turned on them.

So I was listening to Go To Hell and working out the two interleaved rhythm guitar bits, and it struck me that I kind of missed not having a guitar. I wonder what a cheap guitar, a cheap amp and a cheap metal distortion pedal are going for these days.

Ah well, maybe after chemo I'll buy myself a guitar, sort of my reward for going through six months of fairly undiluted hell.

The Mother Node

Most of my swollen cancerous lymph nodes went right back to normal after the first or second chemotherapy treatment. The ones in my neck went away so fast I could almost see it happen, and the longest-lasting of my upper-body nodes, a node deep in the muscle of my right neck/shoulder region, didn't last three weeks. But I've always had a good-sized node in my left groin, and by "good-sized", I'm trying to convey the notion that it was the size of, say, a hard-boiled egg.

For a long time it was the only node I could feel with my fingers, and I came to think of it as the mother node. I really do suspect that it was where my Hodgkin's started, because it was the first one I noticed, and it was by far the largest, and by far the hardest, though I'm not sure there's a correlation between tumor age and nodal tumescence.

But it's histoire. I couldn't find it yesterday, and by simple finger analysis, I am now entirely free of swollen nodes. Granted, the old "gefingerpoken test" isn't as thorough as a PET scan and it's entirely possible that I still have Reed-Sternberg Cells cavorting somewhere in my body, behaving as though my immune system is their Club Med, but I find it exceedingly heartening that as far as I can tell, I'm free of cancer. I won't say I'm actually free of cancer. Only my oncologist can say that. But I can say that as far as I can tell, I'm free of cancer. I no longer have the weird Hodgkin's symptoms like the sudden eruption of almost intolerable itching all over my body or the furious night sweats. I don't feel things poking into my lungs and kidneys. And I can't find tumors with my fingers any more.

Chemotherapy is no picnic. My digestive tract in particular feels like the blasted wasteland of the Somme just after the British and Germans got done with it in World War One, and I certainly don't relish that odd sensation of poisoned sickness that comes over me after chemo. But by cracky, when I put that in the scale, it doesn't some anywhere close to the deep relief that comes from not being to find any cancerous lymph nodes.

Cooking Shows

The Internet is down. I don’t know why. The phone is working but the DSL isn’t, and what more is there to say? The occasion of the Internet being down seems like an odd time to write a blog post, but there’s nothing else to do; why not write a blog post?

Though I’m generally not much of a fan of culinary competition shows, one show that’s starting to grow on me just a little is Dinner: Impossible. The situations are utterly contrived, of course, but that’s not why I watch it. Mostly I find that I like Robert Irvine. I’m not going to start a Robert Irvine fan club (idolatry isn’t my style in any event) but of all the chefs that I’ve seen on the Food Network, he’s about my favorite. Well, Alton Brown is probably my favorite, but I don’t think of him as a chef, not in the same way Robert Irvine is. Alton Brown is more of a… an… well, that’s another show.

The Internet is down so I can’t double-check anything, but I seem to recall reading that Robert Irvine joined the Royal Navy (that would be the British Navy for those unfamiliar with the lingo) at the age of fifteen and served aboard the royal yacht HMS Britannia. I don’t know what his cooking credentials are (his cheferismus) but I doubt that you serve aboard the Royal Yacht if you can’t boil water. And those arms! I’d pay money to see him bench-press Paula Deen.

That said, I now wish to issue citations for overuse of certain words in cooking shows.

Infused. “It’s infused,” she enthused. Yeah, yeah, whatever.

Everyone in the pool. This is a Guy-ism for “put everything in the goddamned pot.” So shut up and do it already.

Now. Take the word now out of Emeril’s vocabulary and he’d practically be mute.

EVOO. Enough with the Rachael-isms. I can almost deal with delish and yum-o and GB, but EVOO tends to break my spirit. I also think that eating at her house must be pretty boring; everything must taste like olive oil. Not that there’s anything wrong with olive oil, but can I get ranch dressing on my salad, please?

Hey, the Internet is back up. But don’t think for a minute I’m going to bother double-checking anything.