Dubious Maxims

All Bets Are Off

noreply@blogger.com (William) — Sat, 21 Nov 2009 02:17:00 +0000

My medical gurus, in between bouts of levitation, chanting and incense-burning, have decided that I do not require a supplemental round of chemotherapy before the transplants begin. Some radiation, but not chemo. Instead, I go in Monday to discuss "transplant options" with the hospital staff. I wonder what that means. Does it mean I get a choice of what organs are transplanted? Can I have, say, George Clooney's face or Robert Irvine's arms? What would happen if I got LeBron James's right leg? It would be really hard to get around; with one really long leg and one normal leg, I'd constantly walk in circles and eventually wear a ring-shaped hole in the carpet.

No, I think they're just going to discuss timing, and the sooner the better, as far as I'm concerned. I wasn't honestly looking forward to a "placeholder" course of ESHAP anyway. If I'm going to have chemo, why not make it the scorched-earth chemo associated with the transplant and have done with it? It's like drinking Jaegermeifter (yes, I know it's Jaegermeister, but before the German alphabet was rationalized, gothic S characters looked like Fs) - the sooner you start, the sooner it's over with.

I guess I'll find out Monday. Further bulletins as events warrant.

601

noreply@blogger.com (William) — Fri, 20 Nov 2009 05:21:00 +0000

This is my six hundred and first post. That's a lot of posts. What would Saint Inez think about that?

Curse of the Pharoahs

noreply@blogger.com (William) — Fri, 20 Nov 2009 00:54:00 +0000

They say* that Howard Carter, the man who discovered Tutankhamun's tomb, died as a result of a curse placed on the tomb by ancient Egyptian priests. Or ancient Egyptian mummies. Or the Pharoahs themselves. Or maybe it was something Zahi Hawass, head of the Supreme Council of Antiquities, did himself. I don't know; the point is that someone put a curse on the tomb dooming its discoverer to some sort of gruesome demise.

Turns out that Howard Carter died of Hodgkin's Lymphoma, the same disease I have. So I wonder what my personal connection to Egypt and/or Tutankhamun might be that I came down with this. After all, I've never been to Egypt. I didn't see the King Tut traveling exhibition. My only real connection to Egypt and mummies is that I've seen practically every mummy movie ever made. Sue me already, I like Brendan Fraser and Imhotep the mummy, waddling around the countryside in lumbering search of tanna leaves, fresh Ace bandages, or princess Ankhesunamen, or whatever her name was (doubtless she was known to her friends as Top Ramen). Is that enough to qualify me for the Curse of the Pharoahs, or am I just a victim of collateral damage? I once made a model of a T-34/85 tank in Egyptian markings; could it have been that? Or was it that Revell 1/32nd scale MiG-21, which I also finished in Egyptian markings? A plastic tank and a plastic airplane don't seem nearly weighty enough to trigger a centuries-old curse, but maybe I underestimate the power of high-impact styrene plastic (much as I underestimate the power of the Dark Side of The Force).

Maybe I should ask John Carpenter. After all, he once made a movie (Prince of Darkness) whose main antagonist was a vat of mint-flavored Liquid Satan. If he can make Liquid Satan into a viable movie villain, surely he would have some sort of insight into how I got tagged by the Curse of the Pharoahs.

* They really do

Workday

noreply@blogger.com (William) — Tue, 17 Nov 2009 00:47:00 +0000

I went to work today. I didn't manage to work a whole day - nine hours. But I didn't do too badly; I managed seven hours before I got so tired I was getting to the point that I wasn't entirely safe driving an automobile. And oh my, is work ever backed up! I don't know how long I'll be able to keep working - that depends on what the doctors decide to do to me. But I'll do it as long as I can; it's fun to get out of the house.

When I got home tonight I took a brief (and unintentional) nap and woke up in the middle of what I believe to be the worst movie ever made. Redline. It's awful. It's awful in every way. It's so awful I have a hard time looking away from it in all its crass, exploitative glory. I do, however, have to mute it immediately, inasmuch as I have absolutely no appetite for rap music at all. Not even a little. Kids today mock the music I listen to (that is, emotionally overwrought Scandinavian death metal) but on what basis?

Ach! Rap-musik! Jugend heute!

CVL

noreply@blogger.com (William) — Sun, 15 Nov 2009 05:05:00 +0000

A view of my Borg implant. Every day I have to pump 3 ml of Heparin and saline into each of the three lines, and twice a week I have to replace the blue tips. The red and blue lines are easy but for some reason the white one always sticks. I have to get two pairs of pliers to break it loose, which makes me feel a bit like I'm a rusty old tractor. A little Liquid Wrench, some torch heat, and a pair of Vise-Grips and I'm good to go.

The central line enters my skin in the middle of the dressing, just under the white circle. Now and then it itches like the dickens, but at least it doesn't hurt. My port, on the other hand, is on the other side of my chest in almost exactly the same spot. It isn't visible except as a date-sized swelling under my skin (the skin over my port has been penetrated with those L-shaped chemo needles so many times it's taken on a permanent purplish hue, sort of like a hickey in a weird spot). Now that they've got tubes down both of my jugular veins, I don't think there's much more they can do to me tube-wise. Oh, I shouldn't tempt fate or pretty soon I'll have a catheter in my bladder too.

The hospital gave me a plastic urinal and a couple of plastic jugs. One of these days I'm supposed to collect a whole day's worth of urine for their analytical delectation. I'm strongly tempted to buy a case or two of the cheapest, nastiest beer I can find so when urine collection day comes, I can present them with two jugs of the nastiest, foamiest beer pee known to man.

Would I really present them with such offensive matter? They're only trying to help, after all. All I can say is that going through ESHAP chemo will make even a meek person vengeful, and the fact that I'm currently listening to black metal (Mayhem, De Mysteriis Dom Sathanas) isn't helping either. Maybe come urine collection day I should listen to an hour of Alan Parsons Project to anesthetize my instinct for revenge.

The Persener

noreply@blogger.com (William) — Sat, 14 Nov 2009 16:45:00 +0000

I was watching a movie on AMC last night and noted that AMC is advertizing the hell out of the remake of The Prisoner. This'll probably blow my geek credentials to hell, but I have to come out of the closet and confess that I never liked The Prisoner.

Oh, I tried. I watched the show. I read the treatises on the symbolism of the bicycle-and-umbrella logo. I listened to the learned elders at science fiction conventions explain why The Prisoner was the most amazingly important TV show ever produced. But in the end, I had to admit that I had more fun watching re-runs of Daktari than The Prisoner. It made no sense, it seemed intentionally obtuse, and nothing ever seemed to happen. Compare this to Daktari, where stuff happened, animals were patched up, lions menaced the vets, and there was plenty of footage of specially-equipped Land Rovers driving across the Serengeti. Compare this to The Prisoner, where all you really get is a lot of formlessly portentious dialogue, enormous beach balls, and a sense of slowly-building ennui that eventually drives one to exclaim This is bullshit! This is overwrought bullshit!

Here's a thought. I never liked Doctor Who either, but I preferred it over The Prisoner.

Now that I'm out of the geek closet, I feel better.

Random Thoughts

noreply@blogger.com (William) — Fri, 13 Nov 2009 04:25:00 +0000

Wouldn't it be amusing if all the people who obsessively use kosher salt because they think iodized salt has a funny aftertaste developed enormous goiters?

Do you think when Arnold Schwarzeneggar was oiled up and posing for a movie camera and uttering his famous line Get to de choppa that he had any inkling that he would in the fullness of time become the Governor of California? Or that as a budding young bodybuilder in Austria that he had any inkling that he would in time be oiled up and posing for a movie camera while uttering Get to de choppa? I can't decide if this represents some kind of deep circularity or if it's just stupid.

(The other day I was browsing the HobbyLink Japan website (www.hlj.com) and I saw they actually used the line Get to de choppa! You have a love a company that'll do that. HobbyLink Japan, by the way, is the source for weird, wild and wonderful hobby products from Japan. There's a link on their website ominously labeled "Japan Culture", but having sworn off anime and manga cold turkey, I fear to click on it.)

I would write more but, to your great relief, I'm going to stop because I have a splitting heache. Finally, an ailment I can't blame on chemo! This headache is mine, I tell you, MINE! It isn't the result of intercalated DNA or alkylated base-pairs or severely disturbed microtubule production; it's something I did to myself by drinking too much coffee this morning. For that reason, I'm kind of fond of it. Compared to the bilious retching nausea, endless diarrhea and aggravating neuropathy of chemo, it's like a visit from an old friend. An old friend with poor hygiene and annoying habits, but an old friend nevertheless.

Vents

noreply@blogger.com (William) — Thu, 12 Nov 2009 15:35:00 +0000

I learned from the movie Big Trouble in Little China that the Chinese have a lot of hells. The Hell of the Upside-Down Swimmers, the Hell of Being Boiled Alive, and so forth. Maybe I shouldn't trust movies so much. The movie might not be such an authentic guide to Chinese culture, considering that at one point it has a Japanese guy, speaking Japanese, pretending to be a Chinese guy speaking Chinese. That's fair to moderately shameful, unless John Carpenter is trying to tell us something.

But let's pretend that the Chinese have a lot of hells anyway. To them must be added a new one, the Hell of Really Early Morning Paid Programming. I woke up this morning well before dawn and ended up staring listlessly at the TV as spasms racked my esophagus (apparently another treat brought to me by chemotherapy, a conclusion I reach because the spasms started the same time chemo started). First it was a bunch of commercials for various forms of make-up, all of which made really quite remarkable claims. This stuff will do everything! It'll cover your acne! It'll cover your unsightly gunshot wound scars! It'll transform your life! It'll inhibit beta decay in the atomic nucleus! It'll reverse aging and raise the dead! It'll make you an even more vapid narcissist than you were before! Then it was a bunch of commercials for various weight loss programs, all of which made really quite remarkable claims. This program will do everything! It'll make (make, mind you; we're not fooling around here) you lose weight! It'll give you a better hairstyle! It'll make you taller! It'll give you better taste in clothing! It'll turn you into what Jesse The Body Ventura once called a sexual Tyrannosaurus! Then it was a food processor gadget, which made really quite remarkable claims. It'll make a hyooge salad in just 38 milliseconds! It'll solve Fermat's Last Theorem without recourse to the modularity conjecture! It'll convert some rubbery, nasty organism we found in a brackish tidepool into something you'd actually want to eat! It'll warm the hearts of crotchety old farts and make you into a culinary hero!

I don't really like olive oil. I live in mortal terror of a cooking show where they cook asparagus and some icky bivalve in a bunch of olive oil. Ugh. Why not put a few road apples and cow pies in there too while you're at it?

Subaru. Love. Yes, I do. I love the commercial where Action Executive picks up the cabbie and proceeds to turn some quiet residential street into his own private race track, startling the cabbie at first before pleasing him. I'd like to see the residents come out of their dwellings, shoot out the tires, and then beat Action Executive to death with rolling pins and hockey sticks. That'll teach you to endanger everyone by treating our quiet residential street as your own private test track, you pompous yuppie bastard. Maybe next time you'll slow down! There won't be a next time, of course, because they've beaten him to death, but you get my drift. (Maybe they should offer an Action Executive action figure. One hand could be specially molded to grip his Action Executive Blackberry; the other to grip his Action Executive Enormous Genitals. Then they could sell a cowboy action figure who could sit on a fence and roll his eyes at the stupendous self-absorption of Action Executive.)

Every now and then the Barefoot Contessa gets around to a show where she says something like "I know my friend is having a hard day, so I thought I'd make him dinner." His "hard day" happens to consist of having to deliver two orders for cut flowers, which doesn't seem all that hard to me. Why doesn't she have friends who have hard days on the order of working a twelve-hour shift in a steel mill? Because there aren't any steel mills in the Hamptons, I guess. The Hamptons must be wildly posh if delivering two batches of flowers counts as a hard day. Heaven forbid anyone should stub their toe; the whole fricking neighborhood would show up with hot dishes to console the poor bastard. How come Ina Garten doesn't cook for me when I'm having a hard day, such as Day Four of a brutal five-day chemotherapy course? Huh?? How about some home-made macaroni and cheese for me, huh? Oh, never mind; she'd just put arthropods in it and ruin it for me anyway.

Or the commercials that depict ordinary things as tasks of almost insuperable difficulty; I always like those. The woman who collapses in exhaustion after peeling three and a half potatoes. Nobody is saying that peeling potatoes is fun, but gee whiz, lady, if peeling three and a half potatoes pushes you to the breaking point, you may need to toughen up just a bit. Or the woman who has a conniption fit because the strain of taking one birth control pill a day crushes her soul and causes the sound track of her life to warble. The poor dear. What if she had to take two pills a day, or flush her central venous line once a day? Is brushing her teeth once a day too much for her too? If so, maybe they should invent a ring that goes in her mouth and bleaches her teeth.

I saw an infomercial for some make-up product called "Meaningful Beauty." What the hell does that mean? Does that mean that all this time we've been pursuing Meaningless Beauty? And what exactly does a "beauty consultant" do? Sit at a desk and look at photographs of things and decide if they're beautiful or not? "Landfill? Not beautiful. Snow-covered mountains? Beautiful. New Jersey? Iffy either way." How does one get that gig?

Last night I watched Good Eats and actually saw Alton Brown use an old-style oil can to squirt some olive oil into a pan. That's just a tad too precious, even for me. He always makes a tedious amateur thespian production out of his rants about uni-taskers, but there he is putting olive oil in a goddamned oil pump can, which is a uni-tasker if I've ever seen one (unless he puts a little thirty-weight in the same can to oil bike chains and the Tin Man when I'm not watching, which I doubt).

Oh, look, another cooking show with the "elite dinner party" theme, showing all these elite stylish people eating elite stylish food and drinking elite stylish wine while the host holds forth on the elite stylishness of the stuff he cooked. How come they never do cooking shows about a bunch of people eating chili dogs while watching a rodeo on TV? Because there aren't any rodeos in Beverly Hills, Napa Valley, or the Hamptons, I guess - let alone chili dogs. The elite food police have special equipment that can detect the characteristic sound of cans of chili being opened, and then they break down your door and send you to a food re-education camp until you admit that, yes, truffle oil really is next to Godliness.

I think my blood sugar must be low. Time to go get out the oil can, some arthropods, and the magical TV food processor and make breakfast, because delivering all these flowers is really going to hurt.

More Chemo

noreply@blogger.com (William) — Thu, 12 Nov 2009 02:38:00 +0000

The results of my most recent PET scan are in, and they are mixed. I still have two active, cancerous nodes. One is less active than the last time; one is slightly more active than the last time. Not larger - they're all much smaller than they were. But active.

My doctors believe that it would be best to have more chemo before the transplant attempt; they want the cancerous nodes as dead as possible before swinging the Big Hammer at them. Fair enough, but it seems somehow predictable that just as I was starting to feel pretty good I'd have to go back under chemo. (Various people use various words to describe this. Some "take" chemo. Some are "on" chemo. Some "do" chemo. For me, "under" chemo seems the most accurate, capturing as it does the sense of having something heavy weighing one down.)

I don't know which sort of chemo yet. Surely not ABVD, since I already did that. I hope not ESHAP, which has proven in my case to be pretty effective but also pretty destructive. It takes me weeks to get over ESHAP in any meaningful way, and I'm not looking forward to losing all the strength I've gained back to another round of ESHAP. But I'm not a doctor, and if they think ESHAP is best, well, I guess that's what we'll do. But I don't have to be happy about it.

Last evening the neighbor's miniature dachshund ran away from home. As a small dog like that would be little more than a snack to the area coyotes, we turned out to help in the search. I wandered around out in the desert with a large flashlight for a meaningfully long time before I got tired, and even then, I didn't get mortally tired, I just sort of ran out of juice. It was nice to be able to do that, and to know that even though I could wear myself out, I wasn't pushing the edge of passing out. But now I'll have to do more ESHAP and I'll be right back in the same boat, bedbound and so weak that a walk to the water cooler is more work than I can manage.

Oh well. One does as one must.

PS: After everyone had given up the search, the little dog came home on his own, thirsty and dusty from his big adventure but unharmed.

Contrast Medium

noreply@blogger.com (William) — Sun, 08 Nov 2009 23:34:00 +0000

I had my PET scan last week. It was actually a combined PET/CT scan, now my third. They want you to drink contrast medium to help visualize the intestines, and you actually have to drink quite a bit of it. They say "two cups" but the cups are the size of McDonalds milk shakes, so when you're trying to get the second one down, it feels more like two quarts.

My old oncology clinic made me drink this nasty white stuff that had about the consistency of 90 weight gear oil. At first the light blueberry flavor tastes pretty good, but the stuff is slimy and nasty and in the end the blueberry flavor becomes unpleasant. It takes some work to chug that stuff down, and it isn't always inclined to stay down, if you know what I mean.

The stuff at the hospital is different. It looks like, and for all the world tastes like, extremely weak strawberry-flavored Koolaid. It's easier to drink that the gooey stuff from the oncology clinic, but much messier on its way out of my system. Machs nichts, I guess - it's all ugly, just ugly in different ways.

My wife tells the story of when she and the kids were driving through South Dakota looking for the Badlands and they stopped to ask a highway department employee where the Badlands were. "Lady, it's all bad land," was his laconic reply. Quite. It's all bad land; the only question is whether it's going to be bad up front or later on.

Lately I've been having troubled dreams about an ugly brown Oldsmobile 98 with no visible driver trying to run me over. I don't think you have to be Freud to figure out what that dream means, but it does highlight the fact that my body has recovered from chemo sufficiently that I can at last actually achieve REM sleep. For several weeks I couldn't sleep for more than about ten minutes at a time, and that's not hyperbole, that's the actual fact. It's difficult to get much of a dream going on in ten minutes and the REM deprivation reaches the point that you'll do anything to knock yourself out for a while, including drinking half a bottle of Old Grand Dad. At least these days I'm not half-crazed by REM deprivation. I'm just half-crazed by dreams of ugly brown Oldsmobiles.

It's all bad land.

Flushing The Line

noreply@blogger.com (William) — Sun, 08 Nov 2009 23:09:00 +0000

I have to flush my central venous line every day. I got some new syringes preloaded with the right heparin-saline mix so it's actually pretty easy to do in a technical sense. A little rubbing with some alcohol swabs, connect up the syringes, and squirt away.

But it's hard psychologically. There's always a lot of air in my tubes - they're clear and the bubbles and voids are easy to see. There's no good way to get the air out, so I have to push it in, and it takes a bit of willpower to knowingly depress the plunger and watch all that air go straight into my circulatory system. I'm told that it takes an awful lot of air in the bloodstream to cause any particular problems, but still, every time I do it I can't help but think of air embolisms and The Bends - not to mention worry if somehow an errant cat hair got into the works and is going to go on a cruise around my circulatory system for a while.

It doesn't help that practically every time I flush my line I come down with a dull headache. What could be causing that? Air? The heparin? Stress? Maybe I don't want to know.

But all of this leaves me in possession of approximately 90 preloaded syringes, and about 120 clean, empty syringes. I'm trying to figure out a way to use them in home repair or craft projects. Maybe built some quasi-Egyptian water pump out of 100 syringes and a wooden crankshaft. There has to be some use for them. (None of them come with steel needles, just the goofy thick plastic "safety needles" whose chief function seems to be to squirt heparin into my eye when I try to express the air bubbles, so I can't actually use them for any injection-related purposes.)

I had my PET scan last week and will presumably get the results this week. I can still feel a lump in my groin so I'm still at Stage I at least. I knew it was too much to expect for the ESHAP chemotherapy to have cured me. According to the statistics I read, it does have a small chance of effecting a complete cure, emphasis on small. And of course, it proved to be too much to hope for that I would have fallen into that small chance.

But I'm plagued by a different problem today. I have three USB thumb drives that I keep various documents, pictures and other geedunkery on. When I got my new computer I consciously put the thumb drives in a safe place, so if the worst happened and the transfer of my junk from one computer to the other went south, I'd at least have the thumb drives to fall back on. Trouble is, I can't remember where I put them. Oh, it's a safe place, all right, so safe I can't find, and don't think I haven't looked. I have a very vivid memory of having seem them only a couple of weeks ago, but the memory does not come with location information. It could have been on Mars for all I can remember. I think it was in the garage, but that doesn't make any sense either, as the garage isn't a particularly safe environment for electronic devices.

But hey, it's still more fun than watching The Next Iron Chef. I've come to detest that show with a heartiness that I'm sure isn't healthy, and is probably immoral to boot. It even colors my perception of Alton Brown - he seemed like he would have enough sense to steer clear of such a train wreck, but there he is, in it up to his elbows, as culpable for that mess as the rest of them. The only thing worse is Chopped, which to my mind has become stranger and even less palatable with its new season. I guess it's endless repeats of Barefoot Contessa and Tyler's Ultimate for me, and you know what? I'm okay with that.

In The Bank

noreply@blogger.com (William) — Tue, 03 Nov 2009 05:46:00 +0000

I have about 5.2 million stem cells in the blood bank right now. I only needed 4 million, but I'm apparently a rich source of the little bastards, since in two sessions of apheresis I produced 5.2 million. Better too many than not because, because apheresis isn't much fun.

It doesn't hurt in any way, but you have to lie relatively still for four hours. Any movement, any coughing, even arm movements unsettle the apheresis machine, which sets up a horrid beeping sound and grinds to a halt. Until I figured that out, I ran the poor med tech guy crazy getting the machine up and running again.

After each session I got extremely wobbly and unsteady, not to mention extremely nauseated. Apheresis may not hurt, but it isn't without consequences. The guy who runs the street sweeper in the hospital parking garage who had to clean up after me can vouch for at that consequence.

But my cells are banked, and now things can slow down a little bit. We had to move extremely quickly to get me ready to harvest stem cells within a few days of my last ESHAP chemo treatment, but now that we have the cells in hand, the time pressure lets off. In fact, it lets off considerably - I hate to jinx myself, but I can't feel a single cancerous node, not even the two that were left over in my groin after the ABVD chemo.

An open appeal: when I go into the hospital for the transplant grande, I would appreciate anyone who reads this to smuggle me in some paper packets of salt and pepper. I had hospital lunches Thursday and Friday, and they had all the makings of nice meals. One was a baked pasta dish with vegetables; the other beef stew and a reasonably flaky biscuit. Unfortunately, neither dish had ever heard of salt or pepper, let alone had any sprinkled on them, so even though they were well made and as palatable as they could be under the circumstances, I'd have given my shoes for some salt.

Pineapple Juice

noreply@blogger.com (William) — Wed, 28 Oct 2009 00:24:00 +0000

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

noreply@blogger.com (William) — Wed, 21 Oct 2009 19:27:00 +0000

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

noreply@blogger.com (William) — Fri, 16 Oct 2009 00:44:00 +0000

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

noreply@blogger.com (William) — Wed, 14 Oct 2009 06:59:00 +0000

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

noreply@blogger.com (William) — Wed, 14 Oct 2009 03:10:00 +0000

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!

noreply@blogger.com (William) — Sat, 10 Oct 2009 18:56:00 +0000

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

noreply@blogger.com (William) — Fri, 09 Oct 2009 01:41:00 +0000

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

noreply@blogger.com (William) — Mon, 05 Oct 2009 02:47:00 +0000

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

noreply@blogger.com (William) — Fri, 02 Oct 2009 18:57:00 +0000

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

noreply@blogger.com (William) — Fri, 02 Oct 2009 18:55:00 +0000

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!

noreply@blogger.com (William) — Fri, 02 Oct 2009 18:50:00 +0000

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.

The Next Iron Zombie

noreply@blogger.com (William) — Tue, 29 Sep 2009 02:58:00 +0000

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

noreply@blogger.com (William) — Thu, 24 Sep 2009 02:45:00 +0000

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.