currently: @928 (1:17pm) on thursday 1.8.09 | 138 hours since last post
The web site you seek / Cannot be located but / Endless others exist
Treatment for cancer sucks. This should come as no surprise at all to anyone who's been through it or who has relatives or friends who have, but jesus. If it wasn't the only way to fight cancer, this shit would be illegal. Chemotherapy is a process by which they pump a couple gallons of deadly poisons into your bloodstream. The idea is to kill all the fast growing cells, of which the cancer cells most fit the bill, but of course other cells that fit the bill are your hair (I was already bald or close enough, but I haven't had to shave my face in about 3 weeks), your taste buds, your intestinal lining, and lots of other things you'd rather keep. Luckily, they also have some bodacious anti-nausea drugs to give you that keep you from the worst of the "classic" chemo side effects.
My two chemo treatments so far have cost about $36000. There's a shot they give you to stimulate white blood cell production that costs $4000. This one little bag of chemo poison costs almost $10,000. Glad our portion of that payment so far has been about $100 total. Thank heaven for Debbie's insurance.
You know how they say there's all these stages that one goes through in traumatic situations - the anger, denial, bargaining, whatever? Well, that's bullshit for me. For about 2 weeks I dealt with all of them at once, all the time, 24 hours a day. Hard to sleep. Hard to be human.
Besides my two chemo treatments so far, which result in about 10 days of the worst fatigue imaginable as my body tries to deal with all the poison, followed by a few days of slowly-increasing energy, I've also managed 4 days in the hospital (severe dehydration etc.).
The last few days have been better than most because they decided to hold off on my next chemo treatment for about a week, give me a little "holiday" as they say. Which means I can probably go see His Holiness the Dalai Lama on Friday, tickets for which I bought months ago.
You know what the worst part of this is? I mean besides the likely to die much sooner and having to deal with chemo and fatigue and denial and anger and bargaining and whatever else? The worst part is that you have to have dialogues with your family about what they're going to do when you're gone. It's not the "I'm going to die soon, so be sure to pay the bills" conversation - I don't plan on dying any time soon. It's the "there's a chance that I might die soon, and so here's all the things you need to know, my love, all the things that I had never intended you to have to know because my whole purpose in life is to take care of you and make sure you never have deal with this shit" conversation. It's the conversations I'm having with my beautiful daughters, about the same sorts of things. That sucks and no mistake.
Anyway, that's where we're at today. I've managed to do some things I thought were beyond me. I played disc golf at VanZee the other day. I got my car started (battery had died) and picked up some of my own prescriptions. I'm taking Maddie to and from school again as long as I can. I'm working 5-8 hours per day, telecommuting of course, but still making important inputs and coding up a storm. The boss has said he has no intention of changing my work status. He doesn't want me to be held to time-sensitive tasks, but rather do what I'm best at, R&D, development of our primary web product, coding, blah blah. He told me that "10% of your time is worth 100% of any other employee." So let's hope that continues.
So that webcam picture... I should take it down, since the cam itself is in a box in my garage, and the office it portrays is someone else's office now (and not the person in the picture.) That's probably one of the oldest continuously displayed webcams online, thinking about it - I put it up back at N2H2, probably around 1998. Gone now. Bonus points for anyone who can tell me what the caption on the cam picture has been for the last 6-8 months at least.
I love you all. The one good thing in this is that I plan to live life to its fullest, every day that I have left. It's too bad it takes a deadly disease to make one decide to do that. I encourage each and every one of you to, as the Japanese say, "Live each day as if you were already dead."
Also, we need some better fucking weather. Jesus.
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