Assimilated

Summary

Had the chemo port installed today, beginning my transformation into a cyborg. Next I'm considering having a 1 terabyte solid state hard drive installed, since my memory isn't what it used to be. No big events upcoming except healing until Tuesday, when I start chemo.

Tedious Details of Kevin's Experience and Upcoming Life (feel free to skip this part)

We got to Parrish at 1230, fairly quickly was called back into the pre op area. Normal stripping, gowning, vitals, etc. followed by a quick chest shave. Can't wait until hair itch starts!

Then, per baseline for any busy surgical day, the waiting started. Sandy and I exhausted the newspaper, analysis of last night's DNC speakers, sports, chatting with people we know (Mrs. Anderson, who in a nice sense of symmetry, was there working the unit the last time I had a port put in in 2005.) After sitting in pleasant silence for a long long time, we were visited by the anesthesia doc, my nurse anesthetist, then a different nurse anesthetist, the surgeon, the OR nurse. Then we waited more. At around 3:30 I got rolled back, went lights out, then woke up feeling like a large cross bred animal had kicked me in my left pec. Wow. Different than last time.

First port was in that little hollow between the collarbone, shoulder, and pec muscle. Just under the skin, nothing with the muscle. That made it, for the whole 15 months it was in, hard to sleep on my side, rubbed on shirts and seat belts, and basically just inconvenient. So Doc Zambos and I agreed on a lower site this time. When I asked him howcome this time it hurt like crazy, he mentioned that he used a, wait for it, "Tunneling Tool" to route the catheter tube through the muscle. There is no possible way to reconcile the terms "pectoral muscle" and "tunneling tool" without including the words "wish I'd known that ahead of time." Still, in a week or two, the whining will stop and hopefully this will be a better location that I have for a LONG LONG time. Why? Two more words: "Maintenance Rituxan." Protocol says take Rituxan for 2 years, just talked with a doc that has a patient still in remission after FIVE years of Rituxan and still in remission.

In other news, continuing my fully justified trashing of everything Moffitt except the scientists, after three weeks of no communication from the Transplant department, who was supposed to schedule an appointment with me immediately, Sandy got a call "reminding" me about my appointment next Thursday at 8am. Issues?
a) I'm in treatment at SCCC that day
b) We had no clue an appointment had ever been scheduled
c) They continue to schedule out of town patients appointments very early in the morning. So we'd have to leave home at 5am, drive through rush hour traffic in TWO major metropolitan areas, plus I-4.
When we got home from OR there was a confused message from a different person at Moffitt saying she'd heard we might have a concern about this. Yup, check that box. For a Human Spaceflight Operations professional, these bozos don't even qualify as rookies. To use one of my favorite analogies, these clowns couldn't organize a one car parade in a one stoplight town.

The Science of Cancer

To loosely quote my buddy Kurt. Chemotherapy will, in a few decades, be looked back upon as a horribly crude and totally medieval form of medicine, right in there with  trepanning with stone axes to let evil spirits out, bleeding by barbers, and amputations with a bullet between the teeth for pain. In a future post, I'll talk about the positive developments in cancer treatments, as opposed to chemo. In this installment of TSOC, I'll use layman's terms to explain chemo. To any medical professional reading this, I apologize in advance. To those who know me well, I'm just following my normal, straightfoward, (ie blunt) way of communicating with a fairly low BS factor.

Remember a few posts ago, where I compared cancer to domestic terrorists? Well, let's take that further. Say a militant radical domestic terror group gets established in Orlando, maybe a few thousand violent nut cases among the 2,000,000 people living in Orange, Seminole, Lake and Osceola counties. These thugs are tearing up the town, lighting off car bombs, maybe making homemade anthrax, and generally being Bad Bunnies. Plus, they are spreading, and pretty soon Tampa, Miami, Jax, and even Atlanta are next.

What to do? These people look just like the rest of us, don't wear uniforms or gang emblems, and have no central HQ. Well, using our cancer analogy, the "standard of care" to clean out these bums is straightforward. Lob in a few neutron bombs. Nice and clean. All terrorists dead, trees and buildings intact. Heck, even the Mouse is ready to reopen undamaged. If you're out of neutron bombs, a nice nerve agent, or maybe a limited biological weapon would do the trick. Dead terrorists, no problems, right?

What, you may ask, about the 1,998,000 dead innocent civilians? Well you OBVIOUSLY can't do simple math. There are 300,000,000+ people in the USA, and more born every day. Less that 1% were toasted to save the whole country. And, we're a lusty, prolific, and migratory people. Wait a while for the bodies to decay, and in 3 years you'll never know the society was sick at all.

Chemo for cancer is actually just like this. Truth time that most doctors won't bluntly tell you. Chemo is poison. The job of the doctor is to calculate the maximum amount of poison you can stand without actually killing you. The next time, he/she looks at your remaining amount of health, recalcs the dose, and poisons you again within, literally, an inch of your life. Repeat until you can't stand more. Hope all the cancer is dead. Wait and see. If not, repeat until cancer kills you or chemo does.

Brutal? Graphic? Negative? - yup. But, under the theory that most people think dying basically sucks, we'd rather get poisoned.

However, as you will read in my book, there's a lot of non-brutal options here and coming. I've had a few, will have more. The goal is to keep pushing victims lives out longer than the cycles of research take. In the chemo world, I have many more choices, more effective and less nasty, than last time. The regime I'm going to have is 2/3 less nasty than what I had last time. So, between that and some really neat stuff I'll talk about next post, things aren't always going to be nearly as ugly as the story above.

Horrible Cancer Joke For You Not To Read

What do you call a person who has a compulsion to get lymphoma over and over again?


A lymphomaniac !


Thanks for the prayers, and God Bless You All

KB