Hi-Rez

I had another CT scan today. Two of them, really, as they weren't satisfied with the first one. Being in a CT scanner reminds me of the movie Contact; the spinning ring brings the Machine to mind. These were pretty high resolution scans too; the woman running the machine told me that she'd scanned me in 2.5 millimeter slices. That's ten slices per inch; all I know is that the ring in the CT scanner was whooshing like a jet engine during the scan.

I start receiving radiation for real on the 10th. The total dose will be 45 Gray, more than normal for treating a lymphoma, but as the radiation oncologist said, "better safe than sorry." And it's not as though there are any particularly vital structures in that part of my body, except for my left hip joint; it's not as though they're going to damage my pancreas or anything.

So now somewhere in the world a computer is building a three-dimensional model of my midsection. They make the 3D model so they can precisely aim the radiation beam, but I like to think they'll wrap an interesting skin on my model so I can see how my midsection would look if I was a reptile or a fish-man. But on the other hand, that means that there is now a 3D computer model of my Naughty Bits. I have mixed feelings about that - what if all it does is make people point and laugh?

Oh, it doesn't matter. Chemo removed every scrap of my dignity already; there's nothing more to be lost. Point and laugh all you like; I'm impervious.

X-Treme

I've been watching Treme on and off, and it's not a bad show. I find most of the characters in the show interesting. Even the Steve Zahn character is fun to watch, even though he can he as irritating as a fair-sized rock in one's shoe. But there are two characters that I really don't like and don't find at all interesting - the pair of street musicians, the snotty guy with the keyboard and the girl with the violin. So these people come down from Wisconsin to help rebuild New Orleans, and all these elitist Nawlins pinheads can do is mock them - "Had you ever heard of the Ninth Ward before Katrina?"

Their insufferable hip snottiness irritates me. Let's pretend that they get their way and all those stupid unhip tourists stay away from New Orleans. Where does that leave them? Playing their street music to nobody, for one thing. Would that make them happy? Would that fulfill them as Nawlins artists? And all this bellyaching about cleaning up and rebuilding. Well, why don't you get off your slacker ass and get a shovel and start doing something, instead of playing music on a street corner and pretending that you're somehow contributing?

Don't get me wrong. I like Treme. But those two insufferable uber-hipsters really cheese me. And maybe that's the hallmark of well-written characters, when they seem real enough to make me want to lecture them about some of the facts of life.

I Sleep Better Knowing This

I tried to send my sister an email where she works apprising her of my cancer situation and the fact that I'm going to start radiation therapy tomorrow. And their web postmaster bounced the email back to me, with this snooty note to the effect that we don't allow profanity on our system. Well don't I feel better! The housing market has collapsed, the financial system melted down, the Taliban is resurgent, Osama bin Who is still out there, and it's suddenly illegal to be Mexican, but they don't allow profanity on their system! Wow, I'm glad there are enough bland faceless IT droids out there in the world to protect us from all that profanity.

The word I used, bastard, isn't even profanity! It has a precise definition and is no more profane than words like illegitimate or conceived out of wedlock. And the exact phrase I used, poor bastard, is so close to daily usage the IT droids might as well complain about phrases like toilet paper or bowel movement.* One could argue that I used the word incorrectly, or in the wrong context, but they weren't judging my grammar or syntax, just the word I picked.

I bet the IT guys who wrote that list go to bars after work and say things like Man, this fucking job's killing me; those bastards in management are really busting my balls!

Arrogant hypocrites. I don't think the world is greatly improved by this sort of nonsense. Or improved at all. But I bet it makes a lot of jobs for IT consultants who can assure the spineless hand-wringers in HR that not a single instance of bastard will slip past their filters. I personally would think it would be more offensive to call someone a retard than a bastard, but retard will zip right on through, no harm, no foul.

* Might I suggest that instead of bowel movement they encourage the use of phrases like make a boo-boo or excrete a man-killingly large bolus.

Positive

Well, I got the results of my PET scan today. Positive, the same two nodes in my groin. They're smaller than before, and less active than before, but they're still cancer.

I'm in the same boat as I was before the bone marrow transplant and $150,000 in medical bills. You'll pardon me if I seem a little disturbed. I'm not sure exactly how I feel - am I royally pissed off at cancer for putting me through this, or am I discouraged that all that suffering added up to a big zero in terms of outcome? Both, I suspect, but I'm having trouble disentangling the threads at the moment. I'll get back to you when my thinking on the matter clarifies.

Let's view this the way Tom Wolfe claims test pilots view things in The Right Stuff.

I've tried A - ABVD chemotherapy
I've tried B - ESHAP chemotherapy
I've tried C - autologous bone marrow transplant

Now I'm trying D, radiation therapy. Five weeks of said radiation, five times a week, 15 minutes per session. I don't know when exactly the radiation will start, other than soon. The hospital and the oncology clinic are holding talks to determine who can do it the most conveniently and inexpensively. The doctor is confident it'll work. I wish I was as optimistic as she is, though maybe when I've had time to think about it, I will be.

Is there an E? There is - an allogenic bone marrow transplant, which differs from an autologous bone marrow transplant in this respect: in an autologous bone marrow transplant, the transplant is done to restore one's bone marrow, which has been killed by high-dose chemotherapy (killed not once, but twice, and still the fucking cancer persists!). In an allgenic bone marrow transplant, the goal is to induce a modified version of graft-versus-host disease with the goal of killing my native immune system with its mutant Reed-Sternberg cells and replacing it with someone else's immune system. Doesn't sound fun to me. Or cheap.

Is there an F? I don't think there is. I'm running out of options.

Needless to say, I think buying a guitar wouldn't be a particularly good idea right now. I was going to have a death-to-cancer party, but that idea seems laughably naive in retrospect. All of a sudden I don't feel much like having a party.

Waiting

I was thinking about buying a guitar, but I think I've decided to put that on hold, at least for a little while. I had a routine PET scan done yesterday and I'm waiting to hear the outcome of that before I decide to do anything one way or the other. I have absolutely no reason to believe that I still have cancer, but once you've had it, you can never entirely get it out of your mind. It lingers, like the smell of stale Patchouli and clove cigarette smoke in a 1980s night club.

The point is that I'm waiting. Next week I'll mark Day 100, the official end of the bone marrow transplant program, and I'll transition back to my old oncologist for routine monitoring. That's if the PET scan reveals nothing. If they do find something, well, I don't know what'll happen then. But it probably won't be a lot of fun, whatever it turns out to be.

But one remains confident. Is there such a thing as "guardedly confident?" There's guarded optimism - arms control talks during the Cold War were said to be full of such stuff. But I don't know about guarded confidence. Maybe it's an all-or-nothing thing; you're either confident or you aren't.

So I'm confident. But wary. And so far, no guitar.

Core Sample

I have to go have another bone marrow biopsy tomorrow. I'm not looking forward to it, but there are worse things in the world. At least the moment they stop the biopsy, it stops hurting; it isn't like having a central line reset, which leaves you feeling like you've been kicked in the chest with pointy-toed shoes five or six times.

It's a little hard to believe that I'm almost at the end of the 100-day bone marrow transplant program. There were times (especially when going through ESHAP and then again when I was having to resort to morphine to kill the chemo-induced burn in my mouth) when I didn't think I'd ever get to the end.

But here we are, one bone marrow biopsy, one PET/CT scan, and one final consult away from the official end of the program. Time's fun when you're having flies, huh?

FB

I have a Facebook page. So does about 90% of the population of the Free World, and most of the Not-So-Free World too. I don't use it for much. I chat with a few friends, I play the occasional round of Mafia Wars, I post the occasional irrelevant status, and that's about it.

But I have certain ideas for how Facebook and Zynga might improve matters, at least for me.

1. Let me hide those useless, annoying So-and-so just became friends with so-and-so messages. You know what? I don't care. The ones that really make me sigh are the So-and-so just became friends with So-and-so and 249 other people. I haven't done a comprehensive study, but I imagine at least a quarter of all Internet traffic these days is composed of these bullshit friend notifications. There must be a way to hide them, but if there is, I can't figure it out.

2. Stop changing Mafia Wars every day. Every time I play (which, I admit, isn't all that often) it looks different and works differently. I know programmers like to change things, but gee whiz, you guys need to develop some sort of configuration control discipline, and that means not changing things just because you can or because it justifies the salaries of your programmers.

3. And while we're at it, can we lose the "Easter Crime Basket" thing? I think that's kind of tacky, personally. Well, one person's tacky is another person's edgy, I guess.

4. Is there a way to filter out So-and-so the Wonder Daughter YouTube video links? Some YouTube links are useful or fun - my wife's horse videos, the occasional OK Go or Insomnium or Bowling For Soup music video. Even clips from the Dr. Horrible Video Blog. But at least a third of the running footage of my status update consists of Wonder Moms posting YouTube videos of their Wonder Daughters - here's so-and-so winning a snowboarding event, here's so-and-so accepting a Nobel Prize for Physics, here's so-and-so passing a navy bean through her nose while her less talented friends look on with mixtures of envy and adulation. I have nothing against the Wonder Moms and their Wonder Daughters, but I get a little weary of slogging through all this YouTubery every day just so I can make sure my actual friends haven't been in a car accident or anything.

5. Please don't send me any more Sorority Life game requests. I am most decidedly not the target demographic for that game.

6. While you're at it, please desist from sending me updates that are quotidian to the point of being lame. "Ok, going to bed now." "Ok, realized that macaroni and cheese is orange." "Ok, bought some navy beans for the Wonder Daughter to pass through her nose later." I don't care, and if you keep it up, I'm going to start posting updates on the success (or lack thereof) of my personal hygiene on your feed.

7. Let's also cut down on the number of pretentiously pseudo-intellectual updates. I recently saw one that just said "Actually..." Actually what? Or those choice "So-and-so thought that life was a beef brisket, but oh he was SO wrong" ones. Unless you're a French existentialist (and maybe not even then) this sort of pseudo-philosophical musing strikes your friends as tedious drivel and doesn't make you seem thoughtful.

8. I find the "Burma-Shave Updates" annoying. This is where someone spaces out an update over the span of 15 separate updates, one word at a time. Unless you really are selling Burma-Shave (and nobody is, these days) or unless the joke is really good, it's just annoying. See #7.

9. Let's try to cut down on the number of So-and-so just became a fan of such and such updates, shall we? Sometimes I'm interested. If a friend suddenly becomes a fan of a given book, author, movie, album or whatever, I'm liable to think "Hmm, I wonder why that is! Perhaps this bears further examination." But if your update is So-and-so just became a fan of yellowish objects, all you've done is waste my time.

10. "U" isn't a word. It's a vowel. Use it as such.

11. So the Wonder Mom posts a wonderful, heartwarming YouTube clip of the Wonder Daughter doing something. Here's a kute video of the Wonder Daughter eating Spaghetti-Os! That's bad enough (see #4 above), but then there are 1,584 comments that all read exactly alike: "I LUV IT! I LUV IT! I LUV LUV LUV LUV LUV IT!" I hate to sound contrary, but I disagree. But if the Wonder Daughter suddenly erupts Spaghetti-Os like Mount Vesuvius, do let me know.

12. There needs to be a Plausibility Index associated with each update, which would be especially helpful in regard to updates from People Who Live Way More Large Than You. So here's some long status message, you're tired, and you don't want to read something along the lines of Well, today I wrote a novel, trained a set of sled dogs, had brunch with His Holiness the Dalai Lama, did some advanced work on cold fusion, edited my poetry manuscript, painted Sandra Bullock's portrait in oils, and went windsurfing. Kind of a quiet day for me. It would be handy to see the Plausibility Meter reading 0% so we could skip that BS entirely and never have to see it.

Julia And I

I just watched Julie & Julia. Or was it Julia & Julie? Oh, whatever. Fun movie - Meryl Streep is so good it's almost creepy, so much so that when the story switched back to Julie, I found myself wishing they'd get to Julia as soon as possible. Not that the Julie story was unappealing, but Meryl Streep stole the whole movie, as far as I'm concerned.

What if some fancy-pants Hollywood type discovered my blog and decided it (for some unfortunate reason) it should be turned into a blog? The resulting movie would make even less sense than Videodrome and be less fun than Out Of Africa.

But it does get one to thinking (which cynics might argue isn't such a good idea for me). If my blog was turned into a movie, who would they cast to play me? Pierce Brosnan seems like a good fit. If he's asking for too much money, why not Will Smith, or Jeff Goldblum?

Oh, sure. They'd be more likely to cast Leonid Brezhnev, after the heart attack.

PS: I am amused to find just how badly I've been mispronouncing Boeuf Bourguignon all these years. I find myself sitting and staring at those words, Boeuf Bourguignon, and the more I stare, the stranger they look. It's like my mind on some dark instinctive level thinks it should be spelled Beowulf Bolognaise.

And that, as they say in Hollywood, is a wrap.

In Other News

In other news...

1. According to my doctors, I'm in full remission. That's a happy thought. It's been a long year and a half, but apparently it wasn't all for nothing. The neuropathy in my feet and legs remains fairly ferocious, but compared to ESHAP chemotherapy and c. difficile and apheresis and all that, it's a picnic. Nothing that experienced in 49 years comes close to ESHAP for sheer sustained horror.

2. Our satellite TV blew up the other day. I think it's something wrong with the antenna, but what do I know. Since there's no satellite TV, we watched the new Star Trek movie the other day. I liked it - it's cheerful and adventurous and fun to watch, but it totally destroys everything that I understand to be canonical about the Star Trek universe. Yeah, I know, it's an alternate timeline and all that, but come on, can we stop proliferating timelines all the time? Would it have been THAT hard to write a prequel that didn't destroy the planet Vulcan and spawn a whole new alternate reality? It shouldn't surprise me, considering who directed it - Lost is nothing BUT proliferating alternate realities, so many of them that honestly, there's no catching up for me.

3. I started watching Breaking Bad the other day, when they were showing a bunch of the early episodes in a row. I quite liked it, though obviously my own experiences with cancer, chemotherapy and the costs thereof may have predisposed me to like it. But the new season? Just another grim crime show, as far as I can tell, good but sufficiently far removed from its original premise that it doesn't seem worth my while.

4. Baxter likes me again. He had to be locked up in the office while my immune system was hors de combat, and he appeared to have forgotten who I was in the span of those months. But now he's back out of lockup and seems happy enough to see me, especially when I have food.

5. I keep toying with the idea of learning a second language. Considering where I live, Spanish would be the obvious choice - I'd be able to read the billboards, if nothing else, and there'd be plenty of opportunity to practice. But intellectually, I'm really attracted to the idea of learning Latin. Latin would be about as useful in Arizona as, say, Finnish or Urdu, and contrary to popular belief Latin isn't even the language that English sprang from. So it'd be like a basketball in a hydroelectric power plant - useless, but fun.

6. I was tempted to believe that the population of out-of-state drivers was starting to wane, now that it has started to get warm, but the other day I was sitting in a modest traffic jam waiting for something to happen and realized that every license plate I could see around me was from Washington State. Every last one. If there hadn't been all those people from Washington on the road, there probably wouldn't have been a traffic jam in the first place. But here's what gets me. In any given romantic comedy, the man is usually an architect and usually lives in either Manhattan or Seattle. So every other movie I watch beats me over the head with the hipness, trendiness and sheer superiority of Seattle, and meantime I'm stuck in a traffic jam consisting entirely of PEOPLE FROM SEATTLE. It's not that I hate Seattle, though I will say that I used to think Seasonal Affective Disorder was a joke until I spent a month in Seattle, and then all the chic scarves and trendy trench coats and oppressively hip coffee joints in the city weren't enough to console me in my desolation. If it's so great, how come it takes me 45 minutes a day longer to drive home in the winter because of all the people from Washington?

One rarely sees movies about Portland, and one rarely sees Oregon license plates on the road here. Coincidence??

7. I think cinema hit a new low with the movie Step Brothers. Yeah, yeah, it's supposed to be a satire of losers who won't grow up and all that, but if it's so painfully stupid and cringe-worthy you can't bear to watch it, what's the point of the satire? It's so awful I actually felt sorry for Will Farrell. It's like watching that ski jumper crash over and over in the opening sequence of Wide World of Sports. You want to reach out and try to help the poor bastard, send him a fruit basket or a coupon for a free massage or something, but there's no stopping the train wreck until the last car has derailed.

The Fun Continues

I have to go have a bone marrow biopsy done next Tuesday. I thought we were all done with those, based on the testimony of my doctor, who told me repeatedly that we wouldn't be doing any more of those. Until yesterday, when suddenly she changed her mind. I suppose it's a useful diagnostic test and it wouldn't be a bad thing to make sure my bone marrow is still clean, but I don't have to like it. The first time I had a bone marrow biopsy, they bent the biopsy needle and had to start over. The second time I bled all over myself. And neither time was much fun.

Pain-wise, it hurts worse to have one's Hickman catheter reworked, but somehow it feels different. It's meat-pain as opposed to bone-pain, and meat-pain is something you sort of get used to dealing with. But the pain of a needle being rammed into your hipbone? It's weird and unusual and quite unpleasant.

I suppose I should quit my bitching; it could be a lot worse.