X

X as in ten, not X as in X. Tomorrow is chemo number X, which is a nice round number but no more significant than any other number, I guess, except that I am slowly, week by week, being worn down by it all. It's like having one of those aggravating chronic chest colds that just won't to away, only chemo doesn't involve much coughing. The good news is that I can see the end from here - my last treatment should be June 3rd, which is almost close enough to touch.

These nights-before-chemo are kind of a drag. It's tempting to view tomorrow as a day off from work, and that's always good. But it's not really a day off, not in the sense of being able to do anything particularly fun. So mostly I sit here and try not to think about the fact that I'll spend a few hours tomorrow morning with a tube hanging out of my chest.

Nobody likes a whiner, but I find that on the nights before chemo, my horizons tend to draw in just a tad.

I have a terrible craving for a Bloody Mary. About six of them, actually. I don't drink very often, and I rarely have mixed drinks when I do. I don't know what it is, but the idea of a Bloody Mary is almost unendurable. I suppose I could drive up to the little store in Wittmann and see if they have V8 or tomato juice, but I'd probably have about as much luck asking them if they happened to have any uranium hexaflouride (it's a sign of life in the sticks when you can be quite sure the store has a plastic jug of Popov vodka, but probably doesn't have any vegetable juice).

Thus my deep need for a Bloody Mary goes unmet, yet again.

A Farewell to Crumpets

I'm slowly giving up on the Food Network. There are certain shows I'll probably keep watching in the future. Alton Brown in all of his irritating geekiness, and Ace of Cakes, even though in real life Duff Goldman would probably irritate me to distraction. But I'm officially giving up on the competition shows, all of them.

No more Throwdown. I must admit that Bobby Flay turned out not to be the jerk I thought he was, but that doesn't mean I like Throwdown either.

No more Chopped. I have nothing against Ted Allen, who seems generally harmless and inoffensive. But I grow weary of the cocky numbnuts they bring in as contestants. There's the guy who is a vegan private chef specializing in probiotic nutriphoria who is simply Way More Spiritual Than You. There's the guy who's going to bring his A-game, go for the three, swing for the fences, put the pedal to the metal and overuse sports cliches until our ears bleed and our souls pucker and die. There's the foodie who knows that the natural counterpart to the munchiness of cabbage is a gastrique of cane sugar, cider vinegar and braised kaiserwurt. Every now and then I do confess a mild interest when something strange appears in the basket ("Octopus?? For DESSERT??") but I really don't need a lot of cocky preening, foodie pretentiousness, or sustainable navel-gazing to go along with it.

No more of that show with the same people over and over who make cakes. They introduce themselves by saying "Hi, I'm Jim and I've been on the Challenge eight times, and I've won twice." People of interest show up once and move on, but somehow these same six or eight people recur with the depressing inevitability of cold sores. The latest incarnation of this show has them competing over the long-term, with slow-motion elimination in the manner of Dancing With The Stars. Lovely. Yet elimination is usually decided by some kind of twist announced by Chef Keenan Wynn - "The Wynner will be determined by a thirty-minute cake-off." A cake-off. I did not make that up. First, I never want to hear an adult say "cake-off". Second, I thought they were already having a goddamned cake-off.

Iron Chef America is kind of fun, but I hate it when the judges get snotty with one another. I notice that most of the time when the judges get snotty, that guy that looks like he's consciously imitating Johnny Depp is involved. Coincidence? I don't think so.

Hence my growing frustration with the Food Network. If I wanted to watch people being cocky, rude, stupid or grating, I'd watch something on Spike.

I started watching it in the dim dark days of December when I was doing a pretty good job of dying of cancer. I didn't feel like eating, and watching Ina Garten didn't make me want to eat either, but it was a way of connecting with the larger world when I was pretty much confined to my bedroom (not even to my bed; I was confined mostly to an office chair because it hurt to lay down). Plus it beat watching obscure college football bowl games on ESPN (the Colon Bowl, I don't know what all).

But either I don't need the connection with the real world any more, or the Food Network's competition shows don't represent any link to any known real world. I'm turning in my spatula.

Kind of Odd

This has been an odd chemo outing in that I don't feel nearly as bad as I have in the past. Bad enough, mind you, but I don't feel like I've been poisoned. Today, for example, my only real complaint is that the Neulasta makes my legs and pelvis hurt. Yesterday I had one episode of severe nausea (just before lunch, natch) but otherwise, nothing. So why don't I feel worse than I do?

I have a theory.

We know that the chemo drugs preferentially kill the cells in my body that reproduce rapidly (often in the very act of reproduction, a touch right out of the Friday the Thirteenth movies where you know the first couple to have sex will be the first couple to die). These dead cells are broken down by the body's custodial workers and their various bits and pieces are put into the bloodstream for disposal. The kidneys filter the bits and pieces out and off they go, down the drain to wherever dead cancer cells go.

I theorize that the high level of cellular breakdown products in the bloodstream contributes considerably to the general feeling of slow death that comes with chemo. But as you start to run out of cancer cells to kill, there just isn't as much junk floating around in your bloodstream, and you just don't feel as bad.

There are people who would accuse me of being overly optimistic, because the basic premise of this theory is that I'm running out of cancer cells to kill, and there are people who would dismiss that as wishful thinking. And maybe it is, but I happen to like the idea that I'm running out of cancer cells. I don't like the siege mentality where you darkly suspect every quarter of your body of harboring renegade colonies of Reed-Sternberg cells; I'd rather imagine that my innards are just about squeaky-clean and cancer-free at this point. And if I have to invent bogus theories to buttress that belief, then by gum I will.

Nine-Down

I'm home from my ninth chemo treatment. I don't feel too awful. I'm tired and drained and I can already feel the Neulasta tickling my bone marrow with its cold dead fingers, but I don't feel too awful. It's too early to say, but it seems that the Zithromax they prescribed me is starting to take the sharp pulsing edge off my toothache, which at the Chinese buffet today had risen to about 11 on the pain scale. (How I wish, when the paramedics had asked me what my pain was when I was having a heart attack, that I had replied "Mine goes to eleven." But alas, "Like, ten" was all I could manage.

I filled out a "pick your top five rock guitarists" thing on Facebook today. The guitarist that I think most impresses me, and has impressed me for a very long time, is Ronnie Montrose. I find him speedy yet tasteful, technical yet artistic, and even when he's playing music that I don't really like, I'm always struck by his personal guitar schwartz. So I typed "Ronnie Montrose" into the application, and got bubkes. No Ronnie Montrose. Oh, I could add Ronnie Montrose, assuming I had a previously unpublished public domain image of him to upload... In the immortal inarticulate snort of Field Marshal Paul von Hindenburg, "Pfui!"

So I moved on to Ville Friman, one of the guitarists for Insomnium, a metal guitarist of refined taste indeed. Not crushingly heavy, and he doesn't "shred" as the hair metal people would say, but he's highly adept at that melancholic metal sound that I find more and more appealing with each passing medical emergency... Err, I mean "day". But they no more had Ville Friman than they had, say, Ronnie Montrose.

Oh, I get it now, we're supposed to pick people like Zak Wylde (spelling?) or Edward van Halen or (God save me) Slash. But come on, guys, what sort of world is it when they have Sammy Hagar (I checked) and they don't have Ronnie Montrose?? Or Chris Burney? Or James Young? Or... Oh, never mind.

Thinking about matters like this makes my chemo seem less onerous, but it isn't very instructive, is it?

No Guitar For Bonzo

Well, I think we can scratch notions of buying a guitar, at least for a few months. My so-called "insurance company" has decided not to pay for my chemotherapy. They either decided not to pay for any of it, or not to pay for more than $2000 of it, I'm a little hazy (my dark suspicion is that they will only pay for $2000 of it, but the deductible eats that up, so it amounts to "none of it"). All they ask in return for this are premiums of $1500 a month. Let me see if I understand this correctly: I pay $1500 a month, they pay $2000 a year? Something's not adding up. Oh, wait, I get it, they want to make a gigantic fucking profit, that's what the deal is.

So now I'll probably have to figure out a way of paying for not only my upcoming chemo treatments, but all the ones I've already had. Fortunately my oncologist and chemo lab are pretty flexible - they mostly roll their eyes and say "Holy shit, that's the worst insurance we've ever heard of." Roger that. I'd be better off I had not paid them a red cent and saved the $1500 a month and applied it to my own medical treatment - I pay the insurance company $1500 a month, and my chemo only costs $1400 a month. Oh, but what happens if you have to go the hospital?? Well, they only pay $5000 a year tops if you're hospitalized. Seriously, I'm missing something here.

I don't want to dwell on it too much because it makes me furious, and I don't think being furious is good for my health right now. I mean, it makes me mad enough my heart pounds and my fists ball up and I fantasize about planting my size 14s in someone's testicular region - not because they offer extremely poor coverage, but because I was stupid enough to imagine that the word "insurance" meant something. I feel a little bit like a fish that bit down on a shiny lure and all of a sudden ended up in the bottom of a fishing boat, looking up at the sky out of a single unblinking eye and wondering "What the hell just happened to me?"

Anyway. I need to calm down. My main priority now is to cure my cancer and survive my chemo, and after that, to pay my medical bills. Getting all worked up about this alleged insurance company isn't doing anything to help. Besides, I'm going to refer the matter to the State of Arizona and see if they can figure out what's going on.

Meantime, I think I'm going to have to defer things like guitars for a while, at least until I get the oncologist all paid up. If anyone in this mess really deserves to be fully paid up, I think it's the doctor who saved my life, not the insurance company that, as near as I can tell, was set up to separate me as efficiently as possible from my disposable income.

It's been so long since I last blogged I almost couldn't remember my password. That's bad either way you slice it - it either means that I haven't written a blog entry in a long time, or my memory is faulty, or both.

I vote for both. I got a little tired of blogging because it seemed that it was nothing but chemo and lymphoma all the time, and sometimes I'd just as soon not have to think about such things. Chemo sucks badly enough as it is without dwelling on every intestinal spasm or nadir of helpless fatigue. I sort of scoffed at the notion of "chemo days" when I first started out, where a "chemo day" is a day where some combination of chemo, cancer and random chance leaves you completely unfit to face the world. Well, they happen. They happen to me. Some days I'm tough and some days I just stay in bed, but since I can't avail myself of such niceties as medical leave or short-term disability, I have to work. Taint fair, I don't think, but who asked me?

This chemo cycle doesn't seem as bad as the last one, but my work has placed fairly large demands on me. In better days I would have viewed this work assignment as a pleasantly meaty challenge, but under chemo, replace "pleasantly meaty" with "almost insuperable". The point is that my chemo symptoms this cycle aren't bad, but factor in the burden of work and I'm about as bad off as I was last cycle, when the physical symptoms were really bad.

As my grandfather once said, I'd complain if they hung me with a new rope.

I'm also a little irritated with the world of music. Insomnium claims to be working on a fourth album, which is good news, but it's so far out in the future they don't have a title or any artwork for the album, and it probably won't be out until next winter - and even then, I strongly suspect that iTunes won't carry it and I'll have to do the Euros-to-dollars conversion on some record store website to buy the CD. (Do you ever wonder if my sudden whim to model much of the Finnish Air Force is motivated by my liking for the band Insomnium? I do.)

I was listening to the album Swan Song by Carcass today. It's not considered their best work, and as it was their last work, it's regarded as a disappointment by those who like the grindy Carcass of old instead of the "death and roll" Carcass of Swan Song. Those "Behind The Music" documentaries would say something like "Fans did not follow Carcass into this new territory..." And it must be said that there's nothing on Swan Song that stands up to such bidness as Corporeal Jigsore Quandary or Inpropagation or Heartwork. But having said that, I have to say that there are some songs on Swan Song that do soothe my savage breast, notably R**k The Vote and Go To Hell, the latter of which I interpret as the band's final statement to the fans that they feel turned on them.

So I was listening to Go To Hell and working out the two interleaved rhythm guitar bits, and it struck me that I kind of missed not having a guitar. I wonder what a cheap guitar, a cheap amp and a cheap metal distortion pedal are going for these days.

Ah well, maybe after chemo I'll buy myself a guitar, sort of my reward for going through six months of fairly undiluted hell.

The Mother Node

Most of my swollen cancerous lymph nodes went right back to normal after the first or second chemotherapy treatment. The ones in my neck went away so fast I could almost see it happen, and the longest-lasting of my upper-body nodes, a node deep in the muscle of my right neck/shoulder region, didn't last three weeks. But I've always had a good-sized node in my left groin, and by "good-sized", I'm trying to convey the notion that it was the size of, say, a hard-boiled egg.

For a long time it was the only node I could feel with my fingers, and I came to think of it as the mother node. I really do suspect that it was where my Hodgkin's started, because it was the first one I noticed, and it was by far the largest, and by far the hardest, though I'm not sure there's a correlation between tumor age and nodal tumescence.

But it's histoire. I couldn't find it yesterday, and by simple finger analysis, I am now entirely free of swollen nodes. Granted, the old "gefingerpoken test" isn't as thorough as a PET scan and it's entirely possible that I still have Reed-Sternberg Cells cavorting somewhere in my body, behaving as though my immune system is their Club Med, but I find it exceedingly heartening that as far as I can tell, I'm free of cancer. I won't say I'm actually free of cancer. Only my oncologist can say that. But I can say that as far as I can tell, I'm free of cancer. I no longer have the weird Hodgkin's symptoms like the sudden eruption of almost intolerable itching all over my body or the furious night sweats. I don't feel things poking into my lungs and kidneys. And I can't find tumors with my fingers any more.

Chemotherapy is no picnic. My digestive tract in particular feels like the blasted wasteland of the Somme just after the British and Germans got done with it in World War One, and I certainly don't relish that odd sensation of poisoned sickness that comes over me after chemo. But by cracky, when I put that in the scale, it doesn't some anywhere close to the deep relief that comes from not being to find any cancerous lymph nodes.

Cooking Shows

The Internet is down. I don’t know why. The phone is working but the DSL isn’t, and what more is there to say? The occasion of the Internet being down seems like an odd time to write a blog post, but there’s nothing else to do; why not write a blog post?

Though I’m generally not much of a fan of culinary competition shows, one show that’s starting to grow on me just a little is Dinner: Impossible. The situations are utterly contrived, of course, but that’s not why I watch it. Mostly I find that I like Robert Irvine. I’m not going to start a Robert Irvine fan club (idolatry isn’t my style in any event) but of all the chefs that I’ve seen on the Food Network, he’s about my favorite. Well, Alton Brown is probably my favorite, but I don’t think of him as a chef, not in the same way Robert Irvine is. Alton Brown is more of a… an… well, that’s another show.

The Internet is down so I can’t double-check anything, but I seem to recall reading that Robert Irvine joined the Royal Navy (that would be the British Navy for those unfamiliar with the lingo) at the age of fifteen and served aboard the royal yacht HMS Britannia. I don’t know what his cooking credentials are (his cheferismus) but I doubt that you serve aboard the Royal Yacht if you can’t boil water. And those arms! I’d pay money to see him bench-press Paula Deen.

That said, I now wish to issue citations for overuse of certain words in cooking shows.

Infused. “It’s infused,” she enthused. Yeah, yeah, whatever.

Everyone in the pool. This is a Guy-ism for “put everything in the goddamned pot.” So shut up and do it already.

Now. Take the word now out of Emeril’s vocabulary and he’d practically be mute.

EVOO. Enough with the Rachael-isms. I can almost deal with delish and yum-o and GB, but EVOO tends to break my spirit. I also think that eating at her house must be pretty boring; everything must taste like olive oil. Not that there’s anything wrong with olive oil, but can I get ranch dressing on my salad, please?

Hey, the Internet is back up. But don’t think for a minute I’m going to bother double-checking anything.

The new me, minus hair and moustache courtesy of the ABVD chemotherapy protocol.

Shaved

Well, I finally got tired of my scruffy, scrawny, inadequate chemo hair and shaved the whole works off. I shaved off the wretched remains of my moustache yesterday, and my hair today. I actually had a lot of hair left, or at least that's the impression that the mass of hair in the sink gave me, but spread it out over my scalp and it probably doesn't amount to much.

Now my head is cold!

7-Down

I'm back from my seventh chemo treatment. I guess it was successful in that it made me feel like I'd been lightly beaten with clubs, ruined my appetite, and turned my urine a bright, sinister red color, the color of the Kool-Aid man's lifeblood. They also adjusted the copay for Neulasta, so now on top of being a pain in the bone marrow, it makes my bank account squeal. Yowzah! Still, I guess my life is worth at least that much money. (It sounds like the premise for a TV game show in a country with a large population and high unemployment - How Much Is Your Life Worth? Where host Dink Martinsyde offers you increasingly large sums of money to kill yourself in various ways, such as eating egg salad sandwiches continuously until your body rejects mayonnaise and you perish in a greasy emulsion. "Is your life worth SIX HUNDRED DOLLARS?" "Hell no!" "Well then, rub garlic toast on your scalp until you wear a hole through your skull!" Sort of like Most Extreme Elimination only without the Safety Fluid.)

Nodal sclerosing Hodgkin's, by the way, in case anyone's wondering. My "signature" in the lymphoma community would be something like "Hodgkins NS4E". But I checked my last remaining node in my groin last night (which sounds like a seventh grader's coded reference to self-stimulation (he said stimulation, a-huh-huh-huh)) and found it much reduced in size and much softer than before. I think it's about to go the way of the do-do and the carrier pigeon, and I couldn't be happier. I'm still a little scandalized by the hulking copay, but I'll get over that on my own. Cancer is something I can't get over on my own.

Chop This

I didn't have a use for the show Chopped on the Food Network. I don't think culinary competition shows really work in any substantial sense to begin with, and I think there are already way too many culinary competition shows as it is. But as dubious as I was about Chopped in the beginning, I have to say, it's set new lows for foodie pretentiousness. "What we have here is an egg-rolled chimichurri apricot sauce with wino loins lightly pan-fried in a combination of butter and plutonium, with serried slaw and squid hearts basted with titmouse entrails and whale blubber..."

Knock it off already, Pierre, it's a fricking sandwich.

A Lesson

I'm at the halfway point in my chemotherapy, and I've learned one thing. If you can possibly not work while doing chemo, don't! This chemo-and-work stuff is for the birds and I only do it out of economic necessity. If I didn't need the money, I'd stay home.

It isn't that chemo leaves one feeling too bad to work, though it does leave one feeling bad. The main problem is that chemo is highly inconvenient. I don't want to gross anyone out, but the blunt fact of chemo (or my chemo, anyway) is that it's dangerous to be more than a minute or two away from a bathroom at any given time. The moment the urge to go the bathroom hits, you'd best beat feet and get to the bathroom because you've got about sixty seconds before the mere urge turns into a quite uncontrollable expulsion.

I used to travel to work pretty light, with everything I wanted in my pockets (phone, iPod and keys, and that's about it). Now I travel with a fairly large canvas bag that contains my chemo road kit. Pills of various sorts, some prescription and some not. Hard candy for when I get sick of the "chemo aftertaste." A sweater for when I get too cold. Suitable lunch products, usually soup and a can of soda. Gatorade. And down in the very bottom of the bag, spare clothes for when one can't get to a bathroom in time and there is An Official Problem.

Usually when that happens I just go home, because changing clothes alone isn't enough. But at least a fresh change of clothes permits one to assume a guise of public respectability long enough to get to the car.

Yes, chemo is very inconvenient. Lunch becomes problematic, because you have to settle, every day, the question "Is thinking about food going to make me sick?" If you drive anywhere, you had best know where the convenience stores are on the route because you may need their bathrooms. There are certain days where leaving the house for any reason at all is a bad idea. And the hell of it is that even on the days when I know it's going to be difficult (the Friday after chemo being the worst) I still have to go to work.

I'm not complaining - not really. I'm just saying that if you don't have to work during your chemo, do yourself a favor and don't try. I've been doing it for three months and it just isn't worth it. The stress alone is more than I can stand some days. But I guess that's the true definition of a wage slave, when you need the money so bad you have to work through the messy sticky horror that is chemotherapy.

But it beats dying. Doesn't it?

Whoops

I was supposed to go to the pulmonologist (?) on the 23rd to have a breathing test done. There's nothing particularly wrong with my breathing, except for how heavy is sounds over the phone when I call at two in the morning.

No, seriously, there's nothing wrong with my breathing, but one of my chemo drugs can cause breathing problems in a certain percentage of patients. So my oncologist, diligent to the end, scheduled me a breathing test for the 23rd. So yesterday I drove to the office and presented myself to the receptionist, eager to get my breathing test out of the way so I could go back to work, or go to the dentist, or just go back home, or something.

The receptionist said "You're a little early, inasmuch as the 23rd is next Monday."

Crap! These appointments, they run together on me!

Doctor's Orders

I am under strict doctor's orders not to trim any trees.

I've been trying to bring order out of chaos, or at least beat back the enormous overgrowth of brush on our property. I feel that I share that with George W. Bush, who also spent a lot of time "cutting brush". Anyway, I managed to get myself fairly scratched up and bruised up while cutting the most recent load of brush.

Since I started chemo I bruise easily, and I bruise oddly. My normal bruises are just that, normal-looking ovoids, but bruises while one is in chemo have a strange spidery aspect. They look like the ships the Shadows flew in Babylon 5, only irregular and misshapen. Anyway, while the esteemed Dr. Adoo was feeling for nodes and listening to my lungs, he noticed the mess that is my forearms, and sternly ordered me to avoid such hijinks in the future.

Never one to take the doctor's orders lightly, I have vowed to avoid any kind of manual labor at all and will spend the next three months assembling 1/72nd scale model airplanes in front of the TV.

He, like I, was unable to feel any swollen nodes. He's pleased with my progress, and as I said elsewhere, anything that pleases my oncologist is liable to tickle the sh** out of me. And now, back to my model airplanes!

Monstervision

Who here remembers that underrated comic genius, Joe Bob Briggs? He used to have a show on one of those early cable super-channels called Monstervision, where he acted as the host for the crappy monster movie du jour. It was sort of like Mystery Science Theater 3000 in overall feel, in that his role was to mock the movie as much as it was to host it. (Once Joe Bob ran for President on what he called the "condom ticket". His stump speech was pretty simple: "I may not be much fun right now, but if you don't use me, you're liable to be in for a nasty surprise later.")

At the end of each movie he had the "Drive-In Totals", where he counted up occurences of various things. Numbers of dead bodies, numbers of gratuitously-displayed dead insects, instances of defenestration, whatever. At the end of each list he would note various acts of -fu, there -fu was meant to demonstrate possession of masterly skill in whatever was being referenced. There was chain saw-fu, chair-fu, Dustbuster-fu, and presumably such things as spaghetti-fu, infrared guidance-fu, and distillery-fu.

With the gone-but-not-forgotten Joe Bob Briggs as my model, I now wish to compile the Drive-In Totals for my most recent chemotherapy, which was so recent that my urine still had the bright red color of Adriamycin.

Bags of fluids: four
Enormous syringes: one
Large syringes: three
Lesser syringes: three
Neulasta syringes: zero
Trips to men's room with IV stand in tow: one
Gratuitous naps: two
Port-fu
Magazine-fu

Debling

Guy Fieri always talks on the Food Network about how he has to "de-bling" to do certain cooking tasks. I wish I could de-bling in the sense of throwing him the hell off the TV so I can watch a cooking show without having to put up with him. Gawd.

I think that show "Drive-ins, Diners and Dives" is one of the most annoying things I've ever seen on the Food Network. How many times do we have to repeat the scene of Guy shoving something down his well-muscled throat and mumbling "That's super-tender" or "that's money" or "that's off the hook" before projectile vomiting sets in? Arrrgh. I'm so sick of him the mere sight of bleached spiked hair, pinkie rings, or sunglasses worn on the back of the head are enough to send me scuttling for the exits.

There is a certain population that thinks that Rachael Ray is the most irritating thing since jock itch. Well, she doesn't have anything on Guy Fieri, and that's money. And is it just me, or does he sound just like Emeril when he shouts? What if he really is Emeril? What if Emeril decided to retool his career by dressing and acting like an overbearing guitarist for a shit garage band? We'd have to say "BAM! Bad career move, Emeril! BAM!" And that is money.

Portnoia

I'm paranoid about my port.

I should explain. I had an access port to my heart installed before I started chemotherapy, partly because it makes access to my bloodsteam easy and convenient, and partly because some of the chemo drugs are so toxic they would destroy ordinary veins that they were injected into. What the port amounts to is a rubber bulb implanted just below the skin on my right pectoral muscle. It feels about like an enormous nipple mounted about three inches above and one inch inboard of the genuine article. From this rubber bulb extends a piece of plastic tubing that goes about halfway up my neck before entering my jugular vein and then proceeding down again and terminating just shy of the heart valve.

What it amounts to, really, is a sort of faucet tapped right into my heart, for good and bad. If allows quick access for chemo, and it allows the chemo drugs to mix with 100 mile per hour bloodflow that prevents the drugs from burning out my veins. But I'm also paranoid. I don't mind the dogs crawling all over me, but not on my upper right quadrant, where the port is. I don't even like to scratch itches in that part of my body. I usually have a fairly relaxed attitude toward my body - I'm the sort of person that finds arterial bleeding "kind of interesting" because how often does one get to see blood squirt? But my port could bleed me out in a matter of a few minutes if something went haywire, and I can never really get that thought entirely out of my head.

It doesn't help that as I lose weight it becomes more and more noticeable. The plastic tubing is clearly visible under my skin, and the port itself seems to grow as my subcutaneous fat slowly disappears. The surgeon that put it in claimed that many people never have any problems with their ports at all and often leave them in for years. I'll accept that the vast majority of ports never cause any problems, but I'm so anxious about mine that I really doubt I'll consent to leaving it in any longer than absolutely necessary.

I guess it's a sign of my increasing ability to withstand chemo in general that subsidiary issues like my port suddenly become Big Damn Deals. And no, I don't feel any better these days. Chemo still sucks. But I'm losing the memory of what it feels like to feel halfway decent and to have a digestive tract that works. I'm finding chemo somewhat easier to deal with physically simply because I'm coming to accept it as normal. I still get depressed sometimes, and I still want to know what I did to deserve all of this, but since I can't remember what it feels like to feel good, I accept feeling bad as inevitable. The dreadful Bookstore Incident doesn't even humiliate me any more; it was just another day in that wonderful paradise that we call chemo.

Nasal Hair

All of my nose hair has fallen out. Sounds pretty funny, doesn't it? Might even sound convenient. But without nose hair, my nose constantly oozes. Constantly. And without nose hair to trap warm air, my nostrils are constantly ice cold, like I'm camping out in the middle of some icy Finnish forest. I'm tempted to tape a piece of flannel to my nose just to keep it warm. I thought about trying to shove absorbent thingamabobs up my nose, but the only things that seemed close to the right size were cigarette filters, and even though I haven't smoked in almost two years, it still seems unwise to tempt fate by putting anything to do with cigarettes up my nose.

In the immortal word of Professor Lupin, "Riddikulus!"

That Time of Year

It's that time of year again, the time when the evening air is heavy with the scent of orange blossoms. I love the scent of orange blossoms and I'm prone to thinking that it is perhaps the perfect aroma. It seems that the aroma of orange blossoms never fails to make me feel a little better no matter what sort of bleak nonsense is going on in my life. Colon dying as a result of chemotherapy? Well, here, have some orange blossom. It helps.

It really does. There are certain scents that I really like. I used to be quite the Polo man, for example, in my twenties. I didn't wear Polo every day, but usually every Friday I'd splash some on, and I'm still quite fond of the smell. Later I decided that I liked Lagerfeld Photo more than Polo, but these days, I'm not so sure - they're both pretty nice, even though they're probably both quite passe. Mind you, I'm not the sort of man who has any business wearing Polo or Lagerfeld any more. I'm neither young nor vigorous, and these days I have more use for a good hand sanitizer than I do a good cologne.

Maybe if they made Polo-scented hand sanitizer I would be in business! As it is, you can tell when I'm close at hand by the scent of Purell on the breeze.

There are several women's perfumes that I like, but I'm really hopeless at remembering their names. I remember Chanel Number Five only because Channel Five used to be an independent TV station in Phoenix that aired, among other things, Action Theater, World Beyond, and The Wallace & Ladmo Show. Perry Ellis is one that I like, but I can't actually remember what it's called. It's "Perry Ellis's Something-Or-The-Other" but I can't remember what. Perry Ellis's Pancreas, I don't know. I also like Red, but I think it's Someone-Or-The-Other's Red, isn't it? I don't remember. Otto von Bismarck's Red, maybe.

But it's sad. As I sit here and think about colognes and perfumes, I can't remember how anything smells except for the weird metallic taste/smell that one of my chemo drugs gives me. I can't even remember what orange blossoms smell like. I just remember that I like it. Being sick is such fun sometimes!

But hey, at least I can't remember what burning rubber smells like either! It's not all bad!