Gulp!

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

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

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

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

I'm cold and scared.

Same As It Ever Was

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

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

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

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


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

Albino Pornography

I'm actually not going to write about albino pornography. I've decided to give some of my posts strange, suggestive titles to see if anyone out there in the world at large is searching for things like albino pornography or hermaphroditic lycanthropes.

No, I mostly just wanted to say that I've been listening to the album Skyforger from Amorphis, and I personally hear a fairly strong echo of Insomnium. And if you know anything about me and my devotion to Insomnium, you'll know that this means that I like Amorphis. It's the same basic quasi-melancholic sound derived from melodic death metal, with the chief difference that Amorphis tends to feature vocals sung clean while Insomnium never moves away from the basic death metal gurgle or throaty whisper.

This isn't death metal that'll warm the cockles of those who dig classic Carcass, Dismember, or any of the Florida bands. Nor will it please the doom/doomdeath folk, as it isn't really either of those (paranthetically, is it even fair to say that good doom metal pleases the doom metal fans? Wouldn't good doom metal cause them even greater despair? Wouldn't it be the ultimate dismissal for a doom metal fan to say "Yeah, I kind of like Warrant..."?)

My point is that Amorphis and Insomnium aren't really death metal or doom metal, but something more like "melancholic metal" that I happen to like a lot.

Next Star

Maybe I'm a soulless automaton, but none of the people on The Next Food Network Star really appeal to me. Is this because I'm an emotionally stunted Philistine, or is this because none of the people on the show are terribly appealing? I'm putting my money on the latter.

But at least we don't have Eddie to kick around any more. I was sure - no, I was terrified - that he was going to win, and I was going to have to avoid his show like the plague. He annoyed me so much I actually longed to watch Guy Fieri, and that takes some doing.

Now that he's gone, I don't really care who wins. Or who loses.

Consternation

Since the last scrub of Endeavor, NASA TV has been in something of a pickle. They were probably hoping for lots of groovy footage from the launch and in-orbit (you can say "on-orbit" if you like, but I won't join you) activities, but the LH2 leak and the subsequent beta-angle cutout till mid-July have seriously denuded the NASA TV schedule.

So they've been playing a sort of advertising video for the Constellation program in the dead time. Constellation, for those who don't know, is the overall name for the manned spacecraft (plural) that will replace the Shuttle when it is retired. Constellation consists of two launch vehicles, the Ares I and the Ares V, the Orion spacecraft (best thought of as an updated Apollo CSM) and the Altair lunar lander (best thought of as an updated LM).

There's a lot to like in all of this. I've always been fairly vocal in my belief that putting holes in your heat shield, such as landing gear doors or separate pieces for the wing leading edge, is too risky for a manned spacecraft, especially one intended to re-enter at hyperbolic speeds. So the Orion is a good move, I think. And I like the Ares V, because I think heavy lifters are always useful. You just never know when you might want to put 120 metric tons of stuff into low orbit in one mighty heave, and I enjoy the homage to the Saturn V implied by the name Ares V.

But the Ares I continues to bug me. It's bugged me since day one, but I sort of forgot about it until they started playing the Constellation pep rally video. The Ares I upper stage is fine - it's a liquid fueled J2X engine, derived from the J2 of S-IVB fame, and there's nothing wrong with that. But the first stage? Hrmm. I come from a generation of rank rocket amateurs that believes with near-religious faith the following commandment:

Thou Shalt Not Attempt To Man-Rate A Solid Fuel Booster.

Period. Full stop. Case closed.

Solid fuel rockets have lots of interesting and useful features. They're relatively inexpensive, especially compared to cyrogenic stages (those that use, say, liquid hydrogen and liquid oxygen). Though difficult to manufacture, they aren't as difficult to manufacture as liquid-fuel engines. Though they are not particularly efficient (meaning that they have a relatively low specific impulse) they can be made extremely large, and since thrust is a function of combustion chamber surface area, size means power, so they can be made extremely powerful indeed. They are also storable, which isn't all that useful in a space launcher, but often of vital import for a military rocket. And solid fuel rockets cannot by definition suffer from an annoying periodic variation in thrust commonly called "pogo" that often plagues liquid-fuel rockets. Problems with resonance are also nonexistent, and the stout steel casing makes for a nice strong fuselage.

But are they safe? Safe enough for launching unmanned things, certainly, where the worst consequence of a catastrophic launch failure is that you have to build a second payload and try again (and, if the failure happened at low altitude, you may also have to fix the parking lot and replace a bunch of burned-out cars). But are they safe enough for manned flights?

I don't think so. Solid-fuel rockets have several grave disadvantages when it comes to manned operations, upon which I dwell below:

1. In a solid fuel rocket, almost all failures are catastrophic ones. Most failures in liquid-fuel engines are also catastrophic, but there are cases of liquid-fuel engines being successfully shut down before exploding. This leads us to...

2. Solid-fuel rockets cannot be shut down. Once they are ignited, they burn until they're out of fuel. There is no way to shut the thing down and abort the launch. If there's a problem after ignition, well, that's just too bad. You can blow open ports in the chamber that vent the gas and prevent the booster from generating any thrust, but you cannot shut down the combustion process itself.

3. TVC (Thrust Vector Control) is much more difficult in solid-fuel rockets. A liquid-fuel rocket can be steered by gimbaling the engine, but a solid-fuel rocket has to use either a movable exhaust nozzle, or some variant of fluid-injection TVC. Fluid injection seems safer to me, but the Ares I is going to use a movable nozzle, which I think presents risks of the flexible gasket burning through, or the movable nozzle becoming jammed with aluminum from the exhaust plume. This has never happened to the Shuttle SRB, which forms the baseline for the Ares I first stage, but it has happened to other solid fuel rockets.

4. It strikes me that most solid-fuel rockets become erratic when they near burn-out. There's no way to completely control the pattern of combustion in the chamber, and the engine's performance varies as parts of the grain burn down to the steel liner ahead of other parts. All sorts of interesting combustion instabilities can occur, one of the most picturesque being "chuffing", often seen in things like the Honest John. Erratic thrust is bad. It makes navigation and guidance difficult, and it shakes the hell out of the spacecraft and its occupants. The only way to get around this, it seems to me, is to jettison the solid fuel booster long before it reaches the point of chuffing and other burnout hijinks, which means that you are having to lift a bunch of excess fuel that you can never use, and if enough of these inefficiencies build up, you start having to surrender capability.


In Summary

The Ares I first stage is based on the Shuttle's SRB, as previously mentioned. And the SRB was the direct cause of 50% of the Shuttle's fatal accidents. Let us not forget that it was a field joint burn-through that led to the loss of Challenger, while in no case has an SSME (Space Shuttle Main Engine) failure led to a loss of life. So in our new design we throw away the part of the propulsion system that has been proven to be efficient, reliable and safe, and we keep the part of the propulsion system that has already caused one fatal accident and to this day continues to suffer from O-ring blow-by in the field joints.

Does this sound like good engineering to you?

It sounds like "cost containment" to me...

Kill The Show

I never liked Jon and Kate Plus Eight. Never. I personally found them unappealing and annoying, I never thought having eight kids was interesting TV, and I never understood the weird cult of personality that surrounded them. But at least in the old days they were merciful enough to stay in the background. Now I can't open a newspaper, turn on the TV or log on to any news website without being tormented by the latest gooshy overwrought emo-drama in their screwed-up universe.

It's time for their fifteen minutes of fame to end. Way past time, actually. TLC has become infamous (with me, anyway) for airing some of the lamest TV shows in the history of the medium, and Jon and Kate Plus Lame-Assed Drama has so severely worn out its welcome that I think they should compensate the public at large for subjecting us to this crap for as long as they have.

Now we have a TV show consisting of "experts" debating whether it's too late to save their relationship. This, I think, is a whole new circle of hell entirely unimagined by Dante.

Does It Get Any Better?

I'm listening to a funky album from the 1970s, Demons and Wizards by Uriah Heep, and reading a PDF of the rules from the game Universe, originally published circa 1981 and just as quickly relegated to the trashheap of history when its publisher went out of business. This is what the Internet is really good for - making available again the freakishly assorted fragments of a past long gone. I'll never again be the same person as I was in 1981 - cancer and heart attacks have a way of stripping the innocence from a person like crummy varnish from a cheap chair - but it's most groovy that the Internet makes the cultural gewgaws of the past available again.

Not that Uriah Heep or crazy science fiction role playing games like Universe are that big a deal in and of themselves; I cite them mainly as examples of what the Internet makes possible these days.

Fuzzy Fruit

There's a fair-sized mesquite tree growing on the south side of our house, just off the walkway that leads to the barn. This time of year the tree is full of bean pods, and the bean pods happen to be a favorite food of the round-tailed squirrel. The bold little devils go right up into the very tops of the trees to get at the bean pods. But if you go outside and spook them, they apparently forget that they're up in a tree and lose their grip. First you hear a terrific scratching and scrabbling as they fight for a grip, then they start to fall out of the tree. They fall, they hit the ground with sodden little whomps, they raise little clouds of dust, and after a few seconds of regaining their wits, they tear off for their holes.

It's the funniest thing. Sometimes I go out there just to see it rain squirrels - scratch scratch scratch whomp scratch scratch scratch whomp.

It does have to be said that we're suffering from an especially heavy infestation of the little fellers this year. They get into everything, including the swimming pool and trash bags, and they leave a messy litter of chewed-up mesquite bean pods everywhere. They get angry when we go out into the garage and they squeak at us from behind boards and rakes.

But I still think watching it rain squirrels is a hoot.

Chief Exports

I'm too lazy (at the moment) to actually look up what the chief exports of Finland happen to be, but I don't think one would to too far amiss in guessing that Finland's chief exports would include fish, forestry equipment, hockey players, reindeer products, and death metal. What? Yes indeed, death metal. I wager that there is no country on Earth that produces as much metal on a per capita basis as Finland.

I mean, just off the top of my head, here are Finnish metal bands that I know of: Insomnium, Children of Bodom, Swallow the Sun, Beherit, Mors Principium Est, Impaled Nazarene, Amorphis, Ensiferum, Finntroll... And there are more, many more.

So what gives over there in Finland? What makes Finland such a power in metal circles? Is it the fact that winter lasts nine months and they've got nothing better to do than write moody black or death metal songs? Or is this some kind of deliberate government policy? Have they set up musical analogues of the Eastern Bloc "Institutes of Physical Culture"? And what does the Finnish government say to all of this? Are they discomfited by this weird embarrassment of dark riches? Or do they pocket the taxes from the record sales and grin all the way to the sauna?

I bet the latter.

And They're Off!

So I'm now two or three days into recovery, and the various horses are on the track. Right now, it's Colon leading by several lengths, with Finger Neuralgia next but falling behind. Nasal Hair and Leg Neuralgia are still stuck in the gate.

My Uncle

My uncle died in hospice today. Everyone says "It's a blessing" and I suppose it is; he was 84 and undergoing a rapid decline that his doctor eventually described as "all of his major systems just shutting down." And I certainly didn't want to see him suffer any more than necessary, or experience any more indignities than he already had.

But he and I both went through chemo, and there's a sort of odd fraternal brotherhood of chemo sufferers. I'm sad he's dead, of course, but more than that, I feel a great sense of pity that he suffered through chemo for nothing. Would he have been better off from a quality-of-life point of view if he'd never undergone chemo, especially since he had chronic lymphoid leukemia, which is generally considered incurable? I don't know. It's not for me to say.

Francis Donald Hamman, 1925 - 2009. In Pace Requiescat.

Tomorrow, We Recover

Tomorrow is normally the day I would be carted off to the oncology clinic to have my chemo treatment. Only, I've had all twelve treatments and it's over. So tomorrow represents a new thing: it will be the longest I've ever gone in the last six months without being poisoned. I'm curious to see how quickly I recover and I wonder what side effect will go away first. Will it be the angry colon? The fragile easily-broken fingernails? The neuralgia in my hands? The tingling in my feet? The chronic ache and fatigue in my legs? The icky taste in my mouth? The fact that I always have to be within 90 seconds of a bathroom no matter where I go?

Which will grow back first, my nose hair, armpit hair, or pubic hair? And why would those three sets of hair fall completely out, but not my chest and arm hair? If anything my chest hair seemed to gain momentum; every time I yanked the dressing off my port, which is located in the upper right part of my chest, the tape seemed to pull out at least 20,000 hairs that were in turn connected to 20,000 exquisitely sensitive nerve endings.

It's hard to tell that it's been two weeks since my last chemo. After a while they become cumulative in effect and I still feel pretty bad from the last one, even now. Perhaps the best way (the most graphic way, certainly) to express this is to point out that I've had to make eleven emergency trips to the bathroom so far today, and the day is far from over. And that's been going on for six months. No wonder my colon hurts.

I have literally no idea of what to expect - but I do know that I'm just as happy to not have to get a fresh dose of chemo tomorrow.

Evicted!

There apparently being no upper limit on how many blogs I can have, other than my own time and energy in maintaining them, I decided to evict discussions of gaming from my main blog and schlepp them off to their own special game ghetto, must as I evicted discussions of scale modeling a while back.

If this keeps up, by 2012 I'll have set up so many specialized blogs I'll have one just to discuss ingrown toenails of the right big toe.

Is that progress?

Anyway, the link to my new gaming blog is:

http://dubious-zoc.blogspot.com/

Health Update

I'm starting to feel halfway decent again after my last (and I do mean last) chemo. I'm still far from normal, but at least it is possible to sit here and contemplate a future where I feel better instead of worse. I still have intestinal problems that border upon the unbearable, and I get extremely tired in the early afternoons, but my leading indicators are all positive. (Remember the old show Wall Street Week with Louis Rukyser? He'd say that my elves were optimistic, though I never really understood what he meant by elves - or much of anything else.)

I went into town today because my uncle is in the hospital and not doing well. I try to be optimistic, but sometimes the evidence of my eyes makes optimism difficult to maintain. He was actually going through chemo at the same oncology clinic that I went to, though I went on Wednesdays and he went on Tuesdays, so I only ran into him there once.

Anyway, my point is that I didn't do much today except drive into down and sit around in the hospital for a while, and eat a halfway decent patty melt at a little restaurant by my mom's house. No forbiddingly difficult physical work there, by any means, but still, by the time I drove home, I was beat. It's been ten days since my last chemo and I still collapse like overcooked spagetti in the afternoons.

But my elves are optimistic. At least I have that going for me.

Whoops

Well, shiver me timbers, I bought this game today. It was first published in 1979 and was one of four games that shared a basically similar system. I bought King Arthur and Bannockburn way back in the olden days, but I never bought Tamerlane (don't quibble with me on the spelling; you spell it your way and I spell it mine) or Black Prince. Until now. I bought the Decision Games re-release of Tamerlane and Bannockburn last year, and scored Black Prince in its original SPI form this morning.

As addictions go, it is at least relatively harmless to my liver.

Russian Autocrats

Last time I checked, a "czar" was one of a series of Russian autocrats that predated the Communist Revolution of 1917, all that "Red October" business. So why do we name officials of the US government after Russian hereditary autocrats? We have drug czars, car czars, intelligence czars, and even (I am not making this up) an "executive compensation czar."

What makes the czars so special? Why not, say, a Finance Fuehrer? Or a Drug Generalissimo? Or a Car Kaiser? Or something like an Executive Compensation Maximum Warlord? Heck, why not go all the way back to the reforms of Diocletian and have a Car Augustus, and reporting to him a Small Car Caesar?

Maybe all my problems are the result of not having czars. Perhaps I need a health czar who will mind my appointments, go to them, suffer the consequences of them, and keep me apprised of how well I'm doing. Or a movie czar who will pick which movie I'm going to watch so I don't spend an hour sitting in front of the drawer full of DVDs sighing wistfully because I can't decide whether to watch Tombstone or Bridget Jones's Diary. Or a don't sweat the small stuff czar, who will console me when I drop buttered toast on the floor by saying "You know, there are lots of things worse in the world."

Or a Roman czar, who, no matter what happens, whispers in my ear Sic transit gloria mundi.

Oh great, like I needed that.

Oh The Pain

I was watching the latest contest on the Food Network, namely, the one where roughly a dozen various nonentities compete to see who is going to become the next Food Network star. I don't have a favorite. But I'm already sick of one of them.

The guy with the quasi-Mohawk looks at the camera and says "You can't keep a tiger in a cage if it doesn't want to stay there." I guess it's supposed to come off sounding bold, confident and assertive, but it just made me sigh. Oh great, another overstuffed corn-fed ego with a balsamic vinegar drizzle and some EVOO.

But even worse, it's flat wrong. Hundreds of zoos keep tigers in cages every day, and I doubt that many of those tigers are really all that keen on staying there.

But I strongly suspect I'm in for disappointment. This same guy appears in the ads for the show about the best thing the various Food Network people have eaten, and why would he be in the ads if he wasn't already one of the Food Network collective?

Meps, Beldar. Meps.

Chemo to the Rescue!

Well, chemo may have just saved me a certain amount of difficulty. Let me 'splain.

I've been reading a book about the Crusades, and I've reached that slow middle portion, after the Third Crusade but before the advent of Baibars the Victorious. It's mostly a lot of dynastic successional nonsense - people marrying their sisters to buttress their claims to the throne, rival pretenders to the throne bribing Genoese merchants to do this or that... It's pretty banal, frankly, and who really remembers the Fifth Crusade anyway?

But it turns out that I have an appetite for such medieval nonsense, and presently I found myself surfing eBay looking for good games on medieval subjects. There aren't many, but there are a few, and among them on eBay was an original copy of The Black Prince, published by SPI in the Golden Days of Wargaming. It's about the Battle of Navarette, where the Black Prince and Pedro the Cruel (I think it was Pedro the Cruel) beat the stuffing out of yet another French army - yes, it's the Hundred Years' War, and there's a lot of French army the stuffing beating out of, if you get my drift. (And, paranthetically, in an age known for exceedingly cruel leaders - this was the same general epoch as Richard the Lionheart, who slaughtered 2,700 unarmed Muslims at Ayyadieh apparently just for the sheer hell of it - what exactly do you have to do to become known to posterity as Pedro the Cruel? The mind reels.)

The game was listed on the Buy It Now feature (my favorite feature) for $28, or about five times what it probably cost new (I have an orginal of King Arthur, its brother, that still bears a price tag of $5.45). ANYWAY. Twenty-eight bucks isn't bad for a game of that vintage, I always liked the Great Medieval Battles system, and given my current steep in medieval history, who could turn down such a thing?

But on the other hand, I've got 200+ games in storage already, and I need another damned wargame like I need schistosomiasis. So I dithered on the edge of clicking the Buy It Now button, wavering between opposing poles of lust and horror, when suddenly the chemo caused a deep and powerful commotion in my colon that required me to flee from the office and get to a bathroom at maximum speed, driving from my mind any thought of Edward or Pedro the Cruel or The Black Prince.

Now that a certain amount of time has passed, I find that I can think about The Black Prince without simultaneously reminding myself that yes, I jolly well do remember my PayPal password and account name. Chemo may have saved me from a descent into a fresh iteration of game hell.

Bony Armored Plates

I stayed home from work today, and in fact, I'm going back to bed in a few minutes, but I decided to come up for air long enough to check my email and blog, however briefly.

Starting yesterday the Neulasta started to really hurt me, mostly in my pelvis and stretching up my back to roughly the area between my shoulder blades. I didn't sleep last night worth a damn, and was in so much pain this morning (and was so groggy) that I figured I'd be an unproductive mess at work.

It felt like I was trying to grow armored bony plates out of my back like a stegosaur. Why would I do that? To protect myself from the allosaurs that roam the carboniferous swamps of central Arizona? To provide an additional means of regulating my temperature other than sweating and heartfelt cursing? To fend off giant man-eating clams? I don't know. I can only report that it felt like I was growing huge bony plates in my back, and it wasn't pleasant.

I can put up with a lot of difficulty and still go to work. I don't want to claim too much credit for myself, but I've managed to keep working throughout my cancer and chemo, and I take some pride in the fact that I've been able to keep working. Oh, mind you, most of the time that's all I could do, and when I got home at night I was completely expended. But I've been able to put up with some pretty unpleasant symptoms and side-effects and still work.

But growing bony armored plates out of my back? That was too much. So I took a Claritin and went back to bed, and that's exactly what I'm going to do now - take another Claritin and go back to bed.

Cart Before The Horse

I'm having problems putting the cart before the horse. I keep thinking "Hot dog, I'm done with chemo and can now do stuff!" So I go out into the garage or attack heaps of laundry or find something else meritorious to do, and within a few minutes I run flat out of energy. Though I may be done with chemo, my last chemo was only a few days ago, and it's still having its merry way with me. My legs seem particularly weak and rubbery this time, perhaps because of accumulated neuropathy and perhaps just because.

So my spirit is all fired up to do things. I've been in an enforced state of inactivity for a long time and I want to fix things, work on the landscaping, build models, clean the garage. I fairly percolate with ideas and intentions. But the body isn't ready yet, so I sit in one spot wishing I could do something while my legs behave for all the world like rubber chickens. It's most annoying. I know that sooner or later I'll recover and I'll be able to do things again, but it isn't happening soon enough to suit me. I've become impatient and I expect my body to work better than it is.

But I did finish the Starclipper model, for whatever that's worth. I was going to post photographs of it but the floppy disk came apart inside my floppy disk drive and apparently destroyed it, so the pictures I took of the finished model amount to what Lovecraft might have called "nuclear chaos beyond angled space." Inaccessible, in another word.

One For The Road

As I mentioned earlier, I had to have one last injection of Neulasta for the road, and today it's kicking my butt. I had notions of doing certain things today, like cleaning my closet and finding an out-of-the-way home for my increasingly cumbersome stack of old magazines, but my various appendages are about as strong, trustworthy and useful as half-cooked rigatoni. So heck with it, I'm working on my New Ware Starclipper model and getting black lacquer all over myself.

I take solace from the fact that I'll never have to do this again. Experience Neulasta, that is. I'm sure I'll get black lacquer all over myself many more times.

Hiccups

Well, I have a final parting episode of hiccups too. I've never found anything in the literature explaining this, but I almost always get hiccups on the day after chemo. And eating two sugar cubes almost always makes them go away.

What a fabulous universe, when sugar can cure the consequences of poison!

Last Treatment

I had my last chemo today, and true to form, I had to have one last dose of Neulasta. I was hoping that we could just let it slide, but my oncologist didn't think that was a good idea, and who am I to argue with all those years of medical school? Actually, I saw my oncologist working in an emergency capacity today helping a patient who had an extremely adverse reaction to chemo (I thin we can define respiratory arrest as an extremely adverse reaction) and he was calm, decisive, and in the end completely effective. My oncologist, Dr. Adoo, is an impressive man.

Not that I'm in any great screaming hurry to see him again. My chemo protocol is complete, and he believes that my prognosis is excellent. I'm scheduled for a bone marrow biopsy a month from now, but it's a routine thing, one of the hurdles one has to leap before one earns the coveted title of Cured. Right now, I'm technically just In Remission, but the chances of being cured are excellent. As much as I like and trust my oncologist, I'd be just as happy if I never had to see him again after the bone marrow biopsy.

I feel like someone has lifted a 300-pound weight off my shoulders. I feel like I can breathe again, like I can make plans for the future that actually mean something and won't be trashed by chemo or cancer. I feel just as bad as ever physically, but mentally and emotionally, I'm a free man again.

(This is liable to sound a little silly, but it is an accurate chart of how my thought processes go. I've always wanted to build the ultimate model of the Saturn V booster. To that end I've been stockpiling parts for a while - the Monogram kit, the New Ware detail set, the New Ware decals, the RealSpace Models batted F-1s and Block-II CSM and BPC, a cardstock launch tower and so forth. But this is easily a year of work, especially the cardstock launch tower, and all of a sudden when you have cancer and you're going through chemo, projects of a year or more seem utterly unrealistic. Nobody has any intention of dying, but the possibility always lurks in the back of one's mine, and one thinks things like "Do I really want to spend six months on a year-long modeling project only to have to abandon it half-done because of badly deteriorating health?" But now that chemo is over and cancer is all but over, I'm suddenly not daunted in the slightest by the year-long Saturn V project, and may indeed start working on parts of it this weekend.)

I feel like dancing. I wonder if Ty Murray is free.

Last Post

This will probably be my last post for a few days. I doubt that I'll feel much like blogging when I get home from work tonight. Tomorrow is chemo day, and it's unlikely that I'll be struck by the urge to write.

I go in today for my final blood test, where they count my various subsets of blood cells and determine whether I'm healthy enough to be poisoned. I should be, but somehow it wouldn't surprise me at all if the universe decided to drag this thing out for a few weeks by screwing with my ANC (Absolute Neutrophil Count) and forcing my oncologist to delay treatment.

It'll be all right. Even though this is my last chemo, I still dread it, and the dread makes me imagine all sorts of nightmare scenarios like delayed treatment, collapsing white blood cell counts, extremities falling off, and aliens bursting out of my chest. Dread before chemo, depression after chemo, it's all a part of life's rich pageant.

That's not really what I wanted to dwell on. Mostly I just wanted to say that I'll be back after chemo, and hopefully my mood post-chemo will be better than my mood pre-chemo.