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.