Growth

I was in the bathroom at work today, looking at myself in the mirror, when I became puzzled by a scruffy growth on my face. What the heck could it be? It could be beard, by gum. Since I stopped chemo my beard has come back with a vengeance. When I was doing chemo I didn't have to shave for weeks on end, and even then my beard never amounted to much more than a light fuzz. But now, criminy. I skip a few days and I suddenly start looking like...

Like who?

If I'm in a particularly self-aggrandizing mood, I'd say I look like Josh Holloway on Lost, since we're both blonde and tend to beard up in about the same way.

If I'm in a less charitable mood, I say I look like Ernest Hemingway waking up off a three-day bender halfway up the side of Mount Kilimamjaro. Which can be fun, sure, but it isn't particularly sexy.

The main thing is that like my stamina and strength, my beard is returning. It's a sign of returning health, but I got sort of used to not having to shave very often.

SS Da Barge

We got this on Friday, a 40-yard container from the local trash hauler. Err, excuse me, solid waste management company. Why? Because we've collected so much crap over the years the sheer quantity of it daunts me. I think about engaging in large-scale clutter removal, and I am defeated by the sheer scale of the job. Just cleaning the junk out of the garage would take several trips to the landfill, and I personally don't care for the way the local landfill is managed. The ground guides are generally absent, it's hard to see the hand signals from the guy in the dozer or the water wagon, and I don't think they do a very good job of maintaining the dumping apron. It's rough, uneven, heavily rutted... The last time I went there were these ridiculous dozer scars running across the apron that were almost deep enough to get a conventional pickup truck stuck, and I personally would have been embarrassed to leave such a mess in my wake if I had been the dozer operator.

But the dumpster deals with all of these issues. It's HUGE. I don't have to deal with conflicting or enigmatic hand signals from people I can hardly see. There's no getting stuck (though I did run my "motorized wheelbarrow", a lawn tractor with a little dump trailer, out of gas while hauling stuff to it).

So I've gotten a bunch of junk cleaned out of the garage, removed a large amount of spider habitat, and discarded about a 20-year accumulating of scale modeling junk. It was stuff that I always intended to get to, but never actually seemed to. My theory is that if I haven't touched the stuff in two or three years, chances are I don't even miss it. And so far I don't.

Tomorrow I propose to get some gasoline and get my motorized wheelbarrow going again so I can get rid of some of the heavier stuff - an old desk, old bales of hay, broken pallets. I have the dumpster till Saturday and I expect that I'll run out of time before I run out of space in the dumpster.

I've been in a mood to declutter for a while, but a friend of mine recently wondered if I wasn't motivated by something else - that is, the desire to reduce my accumulation of useless junk so that if the worst outcome of my cancer comes to pass, I won't leave my family with the task of throwing out a mountain of my meaningless personal junk. It's an interesting theory, and I can't say it's actually wrong, because the thought has gone through my head a time or two. Or three.

So it's food for thought. But I see it this way. The most likely result is that I'll be fine and I'll still be around in fifteen years, in which case the massive decluttering is just that, an attempt to clean up and simplify life. And if the worst happens, well, I feel a little more ready for it. Either way, it's worthwhile, even though I choose to dwell on the former rather than the latter.

My Latest Bullshit Theory

I feel terrible today. I felt terrible yesterday, but today I've felt easily as bad as during the darkest days of chemo. But I have a theory. It's probabl a bullshit theory, but a theory nevertheless.

We know that the cells that line the digestive tract suffer heavy damage from the act of digestion and tend to die off and reproduce with some haste. Most of the time, the cells are arranged in mixed generations so there isn't a massive die-off at one time; instead the cells croak a little at a time and the host never realizes what's going on.

But in my case, I think chemo wiped out most of my randomized generations of epithelial cells. I've got basically one generation, and when it dies off en masse, I go downhill. It's been about seven weeks from my last chemo, so I'm speculating that my epithelial cells tend to die every three and a half weeks. We'll see how I feel later in August and see if my theory is complete crap or not - or maybe by then the generations will have randomized sufficiently that I don't notice this sharp decay in how I feel.

I have a swelling in my neck. I found it the other night, and it scares me considerably. It feels just like a Hodgkins node, with one exception: it hurts when I press on it, which Hodgkins nodes (generally) don't do. I think it's just a muscle strained from moving all the gravel last weekend, or maybe I just hope it is.

I think I'm going crazy.

Downwinder, Not

I was thinking about cancer the other day and was suddenly reminded of the Downwinders. This is a government-defined class of people who lived downwind of the primary nuclear weapon test sites in Nevada in the late 1950s and early 1960s. If you come down with cancer, you are entitled to compensation because fallout from aboveground nuclear tests definitely increases the statistical likelihood of certain cancers. Though it is impossible to say that any given cancer was caused by any given exposure to radioactive materials, you still have to admit that pumping fairly large amounts of radioactive cesium and whatnot into the atmosphere was a Seriously Bad Idea and the people unwittingly exposed deserve compensation.

My dad qualified, not that it did him any good personally, as did my grandmother. My uncle and I, however, are not so fortunate. Though we lived in the downwind area (Coconino County, Arizona, in our cases) our cancers are not covered. Nobody really knows what causes my form of cancer, Hodgkin's Lymphoma. Thus far nobody has been able to pin it to exposure to any particular toxin or radioactive material. Indeed, the only thing that seems to have any correlation with Hodgkin's is infection with the Epstein-Barr Virus, which causes mononucleosis and (allegedly, anyway) Chronic Fatigue Syndrome. But even then, the correlation is only about 50%, meaning that only about half of the people with Hodgkin's test positive for Epstein-Barr.

But on the basis of that 50% correlation is my participation in the Downwinder program nixed.

Pfui!

Silver Bride

Amorphis, "Silver Bride", from www.darklyrics.com

From the mystic dream of a nighttime
I saw the clarity of my days
From the gates of longing
Looked for the familiar glow
The death of my wife's slayer
Brought no comfort to me
No shape for loneliness
For a dream

A queen of gold I made
A silver bride I built
From the northern summer nights
From the winter moon
Responded not my girl
No beating heart I felt
I brought no sighs to the silver lips
No warmth to the gold

Within my heart a flame of desires
Provoked the power of my will
Forced into silvery shape
A golden queen for me
I made our bed under the stars
Covers a-plenty, bear skin hides
Stroked the arc of golden curves
Kissed the lips of silver

A queen of gold - I made her
A silver bride - I built her
A queen of gold - no heart
A silver bride - no warmth

No life

Not A Hiatus

I wouldn't describe this as an official hiatus, but I am probably not going to write much for the next few weeks. I have my reasons, chief (and really, only) among them being the fact that all I can really think about when I write is the prospect of an autologous bone marrow transplant, and thinking about that agitates me. So for the next few weeks I'm going to swim as much as possible, drink plenty of Bloody Marys, listen to music, and do whatever I can to distract myself so I don't agitate myself.

But having said that, I know myself well enough to know that the urge to write runs deep. Who knows, I may write as much as before, or even more. But I doubt it. My life is at a tipping point, whether I asked for it or not, and thinking about it isn't helping me. So if I can think of things to write about that don't involve autologous bone marrow transplants, I'll be back. Otherwise, well, I'll be in the pool, not thinking about things.

SCT

Well, let's all hope that my biopsies come up negative, for the consequences of a positive, it turns out, are pretty severe.

The primary consequence is that I'd need a stem cell transplant, also known as an autologous bone marrow transplant. This has two main consequences.

First is the 10% to 25% chance of dying in the middle of the procedure - the American Cancer Society says 10%, my doctor says 25%. There are various ways of expiring, but none of them sound like fun.

Second is the fact that the SCT is considerd an experimental procedure, isn't covered by most insurance plans, and costs in excess of $100,000. The only way I could possibly afford this is to close out my retirement - I guess you can't retire if you don't survive, but gee whiz...

I am, needless to say, completely freaked out.

So let's all hope for a negative biopsy result. I simply won't accept any other outcome!

The Results Show

The results of my tests are in.

1. The bone marrow biopsy is negative. Done deal.

2. The PET scan results were "good but not perfect", as the doctor put it. All my various nodes and internal problems (megalospeny, for example) have resolved, and they couldn't find any active cancer that could be identified as such. There are two nodes in my groin that are slightly larger and slightly more active than they would like. They can't really say that they are cancerous, and my doctor feels that they most likely are not.

But to make sure, he wants to have then biopsied in August, and since the nodes are relatively small and fairly deep, it'll have to be a CT-guided needle biopsy so they can be sure they're getting a sample of the node and not some random William tissue.

So, what if they are not cancerous? Then we continue having occasional PET scans until they lost interest and declare me cured.

What if they are cancerous? Oh, then it gets tricky, for we have to go to the second line of defense against lymphoma. First, they have to filter large amounts of my blood to secure a supply of stem cells (the precursors, if you will, of the various sorts of blood cells). Then I go into the hospital where I am subjected to a single treatment of very powerful chemotherapy drugs, drugs so powerful they kill the cancer, kill my bone marrow, kill my hair follicles, and have some chance of killing me in the process. Then they return my stem cells to me (an "autologous bone marrow transplant") where they find their various ways to my bone marrow and start to make various sorts of blood cells.

Meantime, I'm in the hospital for a week or ten days, being given blood transfusions and huge doses of antibiotics, because with no bone marrow, I have no immune system and am at risk of all sorts of opportunistic infections.

We don't want that. We want the biopsies to be negative. But damnit, I was hoping this would all be over today and I wouldn't have to worry about more biopsies and have to worry about cancer any more. Dad gummit.

Berfday

Tomorrow is my birthday, and also the day I go to the oncologist and find out if I still have cancer or not. It's liable to either be a very good day or a very bad one. Cancer is not one of those things that respects shades of grey. It's akin to being pregnant, I suppose. One is either entirely pregnant or not pregnant at all; one either has cancer, or not at all. It isn't like having bad vibes, where one can me somewhat freaked, or a bit jittery...

Well wishes are currently being accepted until 1o:45 AM tomorrow, at which time it will be time to see if I can dance or not.

Syfy??

I see the Sci-Fi Channel changed its name to the Syfy Channel. According to the news story I read, this change was made to improve the channel's appeal among women, because the name "sci-fi" was too closely linked with dysfunctional boys who live in basements. I've seen some pretty silly examples of marketing group-think in the past, but this one takes the cake. They really think people are going to like the crap on the channel any better if it's called Syfy? All their crap ghost-hunting shows and joke UFO shows will be just as embarrassing and stupid if the name is the Syfy Channel, the Sci-Fi Channel, or the Bullshit Channel. But at least the latter bears a whiff of honesty.

It's the programming, stupid, not the name.

No News

There is still no news on my tests. All the tests are now done and the plan is to go see the doctor on the 15th. His policy was that he would call us if he found something bad, so if we hadn't heard from him by the time of the scheduled appointment on the 15th, we were to assume that everything was fine.

Which is okay, but here it is, the 10th, and I'd rather not fret for the next five days waiting for the Ominous Phone Call. Why can't he have a quick look at the results, give a quick message ("I wouldn't go signing any long-term lease agreements", for example) and still have the appointmetn on the 15th? Why make me wait for another five days?

Maybe it costs extra to get a telephone report on the outcome of your tests, and heaven knows it's cost plenty already (so far, my chemo bill adds up to about $34,000, next to none of which my insurance will cover, so I'm sensitive to the idea of things costing extra).

But I do seem to be recovering from the chemo. The neuropathy in my hands is considerably improved, and my legs don't hurt quite as much. My feet are still going crazy, but just feeling some improvement in my hands improves my outlook by demonstrating that yes, Virginia, recovery is possible; I'm not going to be stuck like this forever.

Go tell it to the colon, bub. My digestive tract is once again in open revolt. If I was the Czar, I'd be calling for the Cossacks. If I was the President of Iran, I'd be sending in truncheon-swinging thugs. It starts to get better and I start to enjoy an almost-normal state of digestive function, then for no known reason everything goes crazy again for a week. It's very frustrating.

We went to Fry's today to buy, among other things, a licensed copy of Word 2007. While we were looking around my digestive tract went on the warpath, which required a speedy retreat to the bathrooms. Once done, I opened the stall door and took a terrible blow to the head. Someone had riveted some kind of bracket to the very top of the door, a bracket purposely designed to strike me just over the left eyebrow and cut my head open.

So I staggered out of the Fry's bathroom, bleeding from my forehead and cursing a blue streak (surprise blows to my head greatly improve my facility with swearing, I've discovered). And yet, this was chemo's fault. Yeah, whoever pop-riveted that bracket to the door was a complete moron, but I wouldn't have been in there at all if it hadn't been for the Dacarbazine Trots.

Which, upon reflection, may be more than anyone ever wanted to know about my recovery.

Last Man On The Moon

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

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

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

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

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

PET Scan

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Who Needs Transformers?

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

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

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

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

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

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

Tour de Whatever

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

Immaculate

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

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

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

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

The Agony of De Feet

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

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

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

Raptop

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Age quod agis!

Random Pronouncements

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

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

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

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

A Correction

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

Mea culpa.

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

Given the choice, I vote "not".

OW! THAT HURT!