Pineapple Juice

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

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

That's Done

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Day Four

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

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

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

Where The Last Wave Broke

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

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

Day Two

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

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

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

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

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

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

Maldiction!

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

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

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

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

How Unsavory

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

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

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

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

Sunday Night

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

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

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

Afghanistan

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

No News

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

Further bulletins as events warrant.

What A Relief!

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

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