Fashionista

I'm not much of a fashion plate. At work I tend to opt for the casual dress shirt and Docker-like slacks, and at home I'm prone to comfort clothes, chiefly shorts and western shirts that have seen a few too many years of hard service. Not that I dislike nice clothes by any means - I like dressing up as much as the next person, but I am historically very hard on clothes. I'm the sort of person who would accidentially tear a hole in a brand new shirt with a sanding drum mounted in a Dremel tool.

But compared to modern sartorial thought, I appear to be a veritable clothes horse.

I stopped the gas station the other day, and as I was waiting for the gas pump to finish impoverishing me utterly, I noticed that there were three guys at the gas station all wearing pull-on shorts. When did formless plaid pull-on shorts turn into such a hot trend? I have a pair of plaid pull-on shorts too, but they said "pajamas" on the outside of the bag.

But these three guys had more in common than just the pull-on shorts. They were all of a specific type: fat guys with shaved heads, pubic beards, muscle shirts, pull-on shorts, and flip-flops. What up with that? I think it's the pubic beard that bothers me the most. You know what I'm talking about, the scanty fringe of hair completely surrounding the mouth that makes the mouth look more like an excretory sphincter than anything else. I've worn my facial hair in a great many ways over the years, the Rhodesian moustache being one of my favorites (often called a "porn star moustache" by people who have never heard of Rhodesia) but I don't think I've ever adopted the pubic beard.

I don't even like flip-flops. Oh, they're dreadfully convenient around the house, but for some reason the presence of that rubber thing between my toes distracts me to the point of near-madness. And I hate it when the toe of the thing gets stuck under the brake pedal.

No, I think I'm perfectly happy with my western shirts and shorts with actual buttons and shoes with laces, thank you very much.

Clarification

In a previous post I said I was famously dubious of superstring theory. I am, but I am even more dubious of supersymmetry. Without supersymmetry, superstring theory fails (or one might say, fails worse).

Supersymmetry arises from complex mathetical operations in representation theory that I don't presume to understand. How I judge it by is how one should evaluate any theory of physics: how well its predictions compare with experiment. So far, not very damn well.

The real-world ramification of supersymmetry, as opposed to allegedly "elegant" manipulations of theoretical mathematics, is that for every type of particle (electron, W, Z, quarks and so forth) there must be a "supersymmetrical partner" of the opposite type. By "opposite type" I mean that for every fermion, there must be a partner boson, and for every boson there must be a partner fermion. For the electron, a fermion, there must be a boson called a "selectron". I guess that means that for the photon, a boson, there must be a fermion partner, but I don't remember what it's called. Maybe a photino. (Fermions are the constituents of matter, generally speaking, while bosons are the carriers of force, generally speaking.)

ANYWAY. The point is that supersymmetry predicts the existence of a whole bunch of particles that thus far have never been seen in nature, not in particle accelerators, not in the byproducts of cosmic ray impacts in the upper atmosphere, nowhere. Am I the only person who finds it awfully convenient that every time a particle accelerator reaches the lower edge of the presumed energy of these superpartners and never finds them, that the theory is tweaked to make the superpartners just a little more massive?

Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence, of course, but nevertheless at some point one simply has to admit that the emperor is naked. And if the supersymmetric emperor is naked, so is the superstring emperor (and the Minimally Supersymmetric Standard Model as well, but I don't like it either).

Kindled

I heartily recommend the Kindle to one and all. The books are inexpensive. The reader is easy to use and quite convenient. And best of all, it facilitates impulse-buying in a big way. I've had some trouble sleeping over the weekend and more than once found myself browing the on-line store very late at night, just seeing what looked good. Plenty, but I held the line at buying a book on the history of particle accelerators and colliders, a subject (nuclear physics in general) that I have no small amount of interest in.

The book proved to be insufficiently meaty for me - a book on particle accelerators that never even mentions the existence of synchrotron radiation is too light for me (there's a reason the Stanford Linear Accelerator is linear, but you won't learn that reason from this book). The book also mentions superstring theory (which I am famously dubious of) and the Minimally Supersymmetric Standard Model without really explaining why the results of runs at the Large Hadron Collider might be relevant to them, pro or con. (I also hoped there would be some mention of the GZK Limit and cosmic rays and the notion of Doubly-Special Relativity, but I can't really hold the absence of them from the book since they really don't have anything to do with colliders per se.)

In the end, it felt like it started out as a rebuttal of the notion that the Large Hadron Collider might produce quantum black holes or odd quark-antiquark bound pairs called "strangelets" that some theorize could end up destroying the Earth, and the rest of the book was written to flesh out the chapters that weren't about quantum black holes or strangelets.

But that isn't the Kindle's fault, by any means, and it still wasn't a bad book. It beat lying in the dark and trying not to think about the ominous and steady advance in my lymphoma symptoms. It's a good thing chemo starts up again next week, because I'm definitely going downhill again.

Back From The Dead

Well, I'm not back from clinical death, just from feeling like it. I still don't have a theory to explain it, but I increasingly think I brought back microbial friends from Mexico who proceeded to ravage me up one side and down the other for a couple of weeks. I'm sure there's a stress element as well. But whatever the cause, for a couple of weeks I was sick as a dog that had been eating out of the cat litter box. It was all I could do to simply go to work, and sometimes I wasn't entirely successful in that, and when I got home at night I merely collapsed like an Appalachian barn in a windstorm and waited for the next day of workaday tedium.

But lately I've started to feel better. Today was a regular Friday off, and I did nothing last night or today but read and sleep, which I think are activities hazardous to Mexican microbes. Specifically, I've been tinkering with my new Kindle.

A Kindle is a variety of ebook, the Amazon version thereof, and I confess I'm quite taken with the gadget. Friends of ours sent it to me as a gift, sort of a "we can't fix cancer but we can give you something to read" gift. It's approximately the size of an old-style steno pad (but thinner) and it reads surprisingly well. It displays about a half a page at a time in the default font size, but after a few minutes of adjustment the mind accepts the half-size format quite well. Best of all, if you lay it down and fall asleep, it likewise goes to sleep and remembers where you were, so when you wake up and reach for it, it's right where you left off - no more remembering to shove an empty Alka-Seltzer packet in the book as a bookmark before nodding off.

It is kind of amusing on first glimpse, though. It comes in a black pressboard tray that looks for all the world like high-end Chinese takeout, as though the mailman dropped off an order of kung pao chicken instead of a Kindle. It comes preloaded with a dictionary, which is fun enough, but last night at about 11 PM I decided to see if I could buy a new book. The process is so easy as to be rather mysterious. You wiggle the mouse-like knob on the front a few times, you type in a few letters in the search box, and suddenly by means Harry Potter might understand the book arrives on your Kindle. I don't think it took more than a minute or two to find the book I wanted, and no more than a minute or two to download. Within five minutes, not even enough time to go to the fridge for some apple juice, the book was loaded and ready to view, complete with photographs.

Amazing. I'd always assumed that ebooks would involve a lot of clunky setup of wireless networks and whatnot, and maybe some do. This one apparently works on the cell phone network, not the wireless Ethernet in the house, but I could be mistaken. I haven't fully read the user's manual yet, and frankly, who's interested in the technical details anyway? The lack of any billing questions, however, makes me think that my friends paid for the book, not me. I'm going to have to figure out how to change the billing information before I do the Harry Potter Bookus Immediaticus spell again.

I chose as my first book The Ayatollah Begs To Differ, a sort of conversational look at politics and society in post-1979 Iran, or what the author fairly diligently refers to as the Islamic Republic. It's quite a good book, though sometimes when I'm sleepy the profusion of jawbreakingly complex Iranian names can get a little confusing (sort of like The Brothers Karamazov, only a different set of complex names). It also serves to highlight the differences between Presidents Khatami and Ahmadinejad, "reformer" on the one hand and ultraconservative on the other. And the main takeaway is that it is foolish on our part to expect Iranian democracy to look like secular Western democracy - but that it doesn't necessarily have to be frightening either. I am fairly conversant with Shia Islam, at least in the main, but the book does a particularly good job of showing what Shia Islam looks like on the ground, to the millions of people who believe it and practice it (the difference, if you will, between understanding what cancer is and then discovering what it actually feels like, not that I am in any way suggesting that Shia is a form of cancer; I'm merely working with the analogies that come to hand).

Back to my Kindle!

Positive

I tested positive; my lymph nodes are still gripped by the Hodgkin's. I restart chemotherapy in about two weeks, though a different protocol - IGEV - than the old ABVD standby. If I were to name chemotherapy protocols, I'd give them cooler names. Gutbuster or Cranial Poundage or the ever popular This Is Gonna Kick Yo Ass.

"What protocol are you doing?"

"Oh, I'm doing the Italian Nutblaster. Which one are you doing?"

"The You'll Spend A Week In Bed After THIS One protocol."

I'm disappointed, of course, and I'd be lying if I said I wasn't healthily scared. But it isn't as though I haven't done chemo before. Done it before, got through it, and I'll simply have to do it again.

If there are bright spots in any of this, they are:

1. The IGEV protocol is "well tolerated", meaning that I shouldn't projectile vomit, and

2. The IGEV protocol sets my stem cells up nicely for a stem cell transplant, if it comes to that, and

3. There's a very good chance that my wretched intestinal problems are the result not of my old chemotherapy protocol, but chronic overdosing with acetaminophen. Wouldn't THAT be a hoot?

4. My disease, which back around Thanksgiving was Stage-IV and plenty advanced, has retreated all the way back to Stage-I. My oncologist theorizes that the cancer survived in the two nodes in my groin either because their immense size shielded some cells from chemo, or that the cells themselves mutated and developed resistance to the ABVD drugs, which does happen.

And it occurs to me that I used the words "immense size" and "groin" in the same sentence without the slighest hint of self-consciousness. I'm not going crazy; I'm just trying to keep my immune system on the job with dumb jokes. This is no time for my T-lymphocytes (or whatever) to go on strike.

Tomorrow I go find out the result of my biopsy. Serious business. I think the only way my stress level could be higher is if I was in an airplane that was steadily falling apart in mid-air.

I don't see how I can afford a stem cell transplant procedure in the event of a positive result, so this probably isn't a good time to try to convince me that the health care/insurance system doesn't need some sort of reform.

Oh, and while I'm on the subject, Hitler wasn't a socialist; he was a fascist. It might do the shouters a bit of good to learn the difference. The Nazis coined the phrase "National Socialism" in the same spirit of cynical deliberate deception as the No Child Left Behind Act.

I'm too agitated to write anything meaningful. More tomorrow.

Squirrelus Horribilus

I can't prove that this is the same squirrel that ate the rattlesnake, but I'm pretty sure it is. This squirrel projects the same sense of feral red-eyed malevolence as the snake-eater. I bet if I sat still long enough, they'd try to drag me off to their hiding places, probably thinking "Holy cow is this biped ever hard to move, but if we get him hidden away, we'll eat all summer!"

Biopsy Blues

My biopsy Monday was uneventful, if perhaps a tad tedious. The hospital claimed it was all because of them switching to a new computer system, and maybe that really is true, but either way my biopsy was supposed to be at 9 AM and they didn't actually wheel me away for the procedure until 11:30 AM. The only good part of that is that I managed to catch an hour of sleep on the gurney, making up some of the sleep I didn't get the night before.

The biopsy was much easier than they said it would be. My doctor made it sound like it was going to be akin to a kidney transplant - general anesthesia, pipes, ducts, incisions, teams of medical professionals working at a feverish pace against the clock... Actually, the guy just gave me a local and went in with a device that make a clicking sound as it gouged out small bits of my flesh. I didn't feel a thing, and the only damage was to my dignity. Dignity will grow back eventually, I guess.

It was supposed to be guided by CT scan, but they switched to an ultrasound machine. The node in question looked like a lumpy potato on the ultrasound screen, and it was kind of creepy to watch the needle slide into view from upper right to lower left. The guy (it's always a guy, isn't it?) verified that the needle was in the node by wiggling the needle, which made the whole spud-like node wobble.

But so far, no results. It was difficult for me to relax very long, or very thoroughly, on my vacation in Mexico because my mind kept drifting back to the biopsy, the biopsy results, and its potential consequences. As of this writing I don't know what the results are, and it's now late enough in the day that we can pretty much rule out the chance of the doctor telling me the outcome this weekend.

Sigh... Another weekend of uncertainty. What's a boy to do?

Squirrel Irony

Before I left for Mexico I witnessed what could only have been supreme irony in the squirrel world.

A baby rattlesnake about eight inches long got into the garage, and was promptly killed using a long-handled scrub brush. It meant the death of the scrub brush too, which as it turns out had never been designed with withstand pounding action and broke.

But the snake was dead, and a good thing too, because it is apparently not just urban myth that young snakes are more dangerous than older snakes. The younger ones haven't yet learned venom control and tend to reflexively inject all their venom if they bite, whereas older snakes are able to distinguish between defensive bites and hunting bites and may not waste venom on a defensive strike (venom here regarded as a hunting asset, not a defensive weapon).

Anyway, I was sitting outside viewing the tenderized remnants of the little snake, which ended up out by the garbage can. I was still long enough that the little squirrels started to run and scamper and squeak at one another, and presently one of them found the snake. The squirrel sniffed cautiously at the snake, then sniffed somewhat less cautiously, then actually grabbed the snake with his squirrel teeth and dragged it away to his hole.

One didn't have to be The Amazing Kreskin to know that the squirrel was thinking "Hot dog! Usually the snakes eat us, but today I exact a weird and ironic revenge on the snakes!"

Kinda makes me look twice at the squirrels, though. Maybe I shouldn't sit still so long that they decide to try to drag me away.

Pleasing

I think it would please me beyond measure if the Progressive lady would run away with the Geico caveman.

Complications

I was going to go to Mexico this Monday, but I figured it wouldn't be wise to try to drive to Rocky Point on the same day I had a deep biopsy. So I'm going to go Tuesday morning, and will be back Friday afternoon.

The main draw for me is the ocean. I could spend hours just sitting and watching the ocean, and I probably will. Maybe it's some misplaced Viking DNA that makes the ocean so fascinating to me, and maybe as a desert dweller I'm simply astonished to the point of muteness by the sight of so much water.

But it appears that my body has picked a bad time to recycle all its epithelial cells, again. There had better be a bathroom about every half horu along the route, and I know that there are stretches where this is not true, especially the long trawl across the Goldwater range to Ajo, and the business through the Organ Pipe National Monument, and that bleak business between Sonoita and Puerto Penasco itself.

This is becoming very frustrating. When exactly can I expect this unpleasant chemotherapy side effect to finally go away? Or is this a side effect of the anxiety I feel? My stress level is extremely high these days, for many reasons that don't all revolve around cancer, and it's possible my innards have just gone berzerk from stress.

Either way, if I don't get better soon, going to Mexico becomes doubtful, and I just HATE the thought of that.

Growth

I was in the bathroom at work today, looking at myself in the mirror, when I became puzzled by a scruffy growth on my face. What the heck could it be? It could be beard, by gum. Since I stopped chemo my beard has come back with a vengeance. When I was doing chemo I didn't have to shave for weeks on end, and even then my beard never amounted to much more than a light fuzz. But now, criminy. I skip a few days and I suddenly start looking like...

Like who?

If I'm in a particularly self-aggrandizing mood, I'd say I look like Josh Holloway on Lost, since we're both blonde and tend to beard up in about the same way.

If I'm in a less charitable mood, I say I look like Ernest Hemingway waking up off a three-day bender halfway up the side of Mount Kilimamjaro. Which can be fun, sure, but it isn't particularly sexy.

The main thing is that like my stamina and strength, my beard is returning. It's a sign of returning health, but I got sort of used to not having to shave very often.

SS Da Barge

We got this on Friday, a 40-yard container from the local trash hauler. Err, excuse me, solid waste management company. Why? Because we've collected so much crap over the years the sheer quantity of it daunts me. I think about engaging in large-scale clutter removal, and I am defeated by the sheer scale of the job. Just cleaning the junk out of the garage would take several trips to the landfill, and I personally don't care for the way the local landfill is managed. The ground guides are generally absent, it's hard to see the hand signals from the guy in the dozer or the water wagon, and I don't think they do a very good job of maintaining the dumping apron. It's rough, uneven, heavily rutted... The last time I went there were these ridiculous dozer scars running across the apron that were almost deep enough to get a conventional pickup truck stuck, and I personally would have been embarrassed to leave such a mess in my wake if I had been the dozer operator.

But the dumpster deals with all of these issues. It's HUGE. I don't have to deal with conflicting or enigmatic hand signals from people I can hardly see. There's no getting stuck (though I did run my "motorized wheelbarrow", a lawn tractor with a little dump trailer, out of gas while hauling stuff to it).

So I've gotten a bunch of junk cleaned out of the garage, removed a large amount of spider habitat, and discarded about a 20-year accumulating of scale modeling junk. It was stuff that I always intended to get to, but never actually seemed to. My theory is that if I haven't touched the stuff in two or three years, chances are I don't even miss it. And so far I don't.

Tomorrow I propose to get some gasoline and get my motorized wheelbarrow going again so I can get rid of some of the heavier stuff - an old desk, old bales of hay, broken pallets. I have the dumpster till Saturday and I expect that I'll run out of time before I run out of space in the dumpster.

I've been in a mood to declutter for a while, but a friend of mine recently wondered if I wasn't motivated by something else - that is, the desire to reduce my accumulation of useless junk so that if the worst outcome of my cancer comes to pass, I won't leave my family with the task of throwing out a mountain of my meaningless personal junk. It's an interesting theory, and I can't say it's actually wrong, because the thought has gone through my head a time or two. Or three.

So it's food for thought. But I see it this way. The most likely result is that I'll be fine and I'll still be around in fifteen years, in which case the massive decluttering is just that, an attempt to clean up and simplify life. And if the worst happens, well, I feel a little more ready for it. Either way, it's worthwhile, even though I choose to dwell on the former rather than the latter.

My Latest Bullshit Theory

I feel terrible today. I felt terrible yesterday, but today I've felt easily as bad as during the darkest days of chemo. But I have a theory. It's probabl a bullshit theory, but a theory nevertheless.

We know that the cells that line the digestive tract suffer heavy damage from the act of digestion and tend to die off and reproduce with some haste. Most of the time, the cells are arranged in mixed generations so there isn't a massive die-off at one time; instead the cells croak a little at a time and the host never realizes what's going on.

But in my case, I think chemo wiped out most of my randomized generations of epithelial cells. I've got basically one generation, and when it dies off en masse, I go downhill. It's been about seven weeks from my last chemo, so I'm speculating that my epithelial cells tend to die every three and a half weeks. We'll see how I feel later in August and see if my theory is complete crap or not - or maybe by then the generations will have randomized sufficiently that I don't notice this sharp decay in how I feel.

I have a swelling in my neck. I found it the other night, and it scares me considerably. It feels just like a Hodgkins node, with one exception: it hurts when I press on it, which Hodgkins nodes (generally) don't do. I think it's just a muscle strained from moving all the gravel last weekend, or maybe I just hope it is.

I think I'm going crazy.

Downwinder, Not

I was thinking about cancer the other day and was suddenly reminded of the Downwinders. This is a government-defined class of people who lived downwind of the primary nuclear weapon test sites in Nevada in the late 1950s and early 1960s. If you come down with cancer, you are entitled to compensation because fallout from aboveground nuclear tests definitely increases the statistical likelihood of certain cancers. Though it is impossible to say that any given cancer was caused by any given exposure to radioactive materials, you still have to admit that pumping fairly large amounts of radioactive cesium and whatnot into the atmosphere was a Seriously Bad Idea and the people unwittingly exposed deserve compensation.

My dad qualified, not that it did him any good personally, as did my grandmother. My uncle and I, however, are not so fortunate. Though we lived in the downwind area (Coconino County, Arizona, in our cases) our cancers are not covered. Nobody really knows what causes my form of cancer, Hodgkin's Lymphoma. Thus far nobody has been able to pin it to exposure to any particular toxin or radioactive material. Indeed, the only thing that seems to have any correlation with Hodgkin's is infection with the Epstein-Barr Virus, which causes mononucleosis and (allegedly, anyway) Chronic Fatigue Syndrome. But even then, the correlation is only about 50%, meaning that only about half of the people with Hodgkin's test positive for Epstein-Barr.

But on the basis of that 50% correlation is my participation in the Downwinder program nixed.

Pfui!

Silver Bride

Amorphis, "Silver Bride", from www.darklyrics.com

From the mystic dream of a nighttime
I saw the clarity of my days
From the gates of longing
Looked for the familiar glow
The death of my wife's slayer
Brought no comfort to me
No shape for loneliness
For a dream

A queen of gold I made
A silver bride I built
From the northern summer nights
From the winter moon
Responded not my girl
No beating heart I felt
I brought no sighs to the silver lips
No warmth to the gold

Within my heart a flame of desires
Provoked the power of my will
Forced into silvery shape
A golden queen for me
I made our bed under the stars
Covers a-plenty, bear skin hides
Stroked the arc of golden curves
Kissed the lips of silver

A queen of gold - I made her
A silver bride - I built her
A queen of gold - no heart
A silver bride - no warmth

No life

Not A Hiatus

I wouldn't describe this as an official hiatus, but I am probably not going to write much for the next few weeks. I have my reasons, chief (and really, only) among them being the fact that all I can really think about when I write is the prospect of an autologous bone marrow transplant, and thinking about that agitates me. So for the next few weeks I'm going to swim as much as possible, drink plenty of Bloody Marys, listen to music, and do whatever I can to distract myself so I don't agitate myself.

But having said that, I know myself well enough to know that the urge to write runs deep. Who knows, I may write as much as before, or even more. But I doubt it. My life is at a tipping point, whether I asked for it or not, and thinking about it isn't helping me. So if I can think of things to write about that don't involve autologous bone marrow transplants, I'll be back. Otherwise, well, I'll be in the pool, not thinking about things.

SCT

Well, let's all hope that my biopsies come up negative, for the consequences of a positive, it turns out, are pretty severe.

The primary consequence is that I'd need a stem cell transplant, also known as an autologous bone marrow transplant. This has two main consequences.

First is the 10% to 25% chance of dying in the middle of the procedure - the American Cancer Society says 10%, my doctor says 25%. There are various ways of expiring, but none of them sound like fun.

Second is the fact that the SCT is considerd an experimental procedure, isn't covered by most insurance plans, and costs in excess of $100,000. The only way I could possibly afford this is to close out my retirement - I guess you can't retire if you don't survive, but gee whiz...

I am, needless to say, completely freaked out.

So let's all hope for a negative biopsy result. I simply won't accept any other outcome!

The Results Show

The results of my tests are in.

1. The bone marrow biopsy is negative. Done deal.

2. The PET scan results were "good but not perfect", as the doctor put it. All my various nodes and internal problems (megalospeny, for example) have resolved, and they couldn't find any active cancer that could be identified as such. There are two nodes in my groin that are slightly larger and slightly more active than they would like. They can't really say that they are cancerous, and my doctor feels that they most likely are not.

But to make sure, he wants to have then biopsied in August, and since the nodes are relatively small and fairly deep, it'll have to be a CT-guided needle biopsy so they can be sure they're getting a sample of the node and not some random William tissue.

So, what if they are not cancerous? Then we continue having occasional PET scans until they lost interest and declare me cured.

What if they are cancerous? Oh, then it gets tricky, for we have to go to the second line of defense against lymphoma. First, they have to filter large amounts of my blood to secure a supply of stem cells (the precursors, if you will, of the various sorts of blood cells). Then I go into the hospital where I am subjected to a single treatment of very powerful chemotherapy drugs, drugs so powerful they kill the cancer, kill my bone marrow, kill my hair follicles, and have some chance of killing me in the process. Then they return my stem cells to me (an "autologous bone marrow transplant") where they find their various ways to my bone marrow and start to make various sorts of blood cells.

Meantime, I'm in the hospital for a week or ten days, being given blood transfusions and huge doses of antibiotics, because with no bone marrow, I have no immune system and am at risk of all sorts of opportunistic infections.

We don't want that. We want the biopsies to be negative. But damnit, I was hoping this would all be over today and I wouldn't have to worry about more biopsies and have to worry about cancer any more. Dad gummit.

Berfday

Tomorrow is my birthday, and also the day I go to the oncologist and find out if I still have cancer or not. It's liable to either be a very good day or a very bad one. Cancer is not one of those things that respects shades of grey. It's akin to being pregnant, I suppose. One is either entirely pregnant or not pregnant at all; one either has cancer, or not at all. It isn't like having bad vibes, where one can me somewhat freaked, or a bit jittery...

Well wishes are currently being accepted until 1o:45 AM tomorrow, at which time it will be time to see if I can dance or not.