Draining Times

As I start typing this post, my father is being bombarded by energy particles in a metal shell. The PET scan is to determine whether the tumor in his stomach has changed size one way or another. The hopes were that it would be mostly gone after the second round of chemotherapy.

Since nothing has been exiting his stomach in a downward direction, there are a lot of concerns at the moment. Doctors have been puzzling over the case and many a theory broached, yet this is the test that will shed the most light on just what is happening. Surgery may be required if the RCHOP regimen has failed.

Meanwhile, Dad is not looking good today. He's as gray as his hair due to a lack of sleep and dramatic loss of weight. Fortunately, my sister is here to assist in looking after him. My immune system has shown signs of wanting to go on strike, so I spent yesterday at home resting.

It has been especially difficult for my father the last 48 hours thanks to having a tube down his nose going to his stomach. Since nothing is making its way through his GI system, constant pumping of his stomach is required. This has been a miserable experience resulting in his not sleeping.

Hopefully they will give him something to knock him out tonight.

Back to the home front, the house needs cleaning and sterilizing -- no exaggeration. This morning the long process began and I hope to get more done so Dad can come home to a less infection causing environment. Cat litter boxes have been cleaned, initial stabs at saving vomit stained clothing and rugs tried, and most organic refuse disposed of. Next is cleaning out the refrigerator including a too old duck. The latter will have to be buried somewhere where the soil is sufficiently thawed.

All of this is presuming father will be coming home. The possibility he won't make it increases the longer things stretch on. That might upset some reading this, but being a true adult means facing reality head on preferably without flinching.

All will be dealt with as it comes, no matter how messy.

Dad has a large number of people praying for him and a top notch hospital taking care of him. That's something to be grateful for.

Emergency Room Blues

As I sit in the ER for the second time in two days, things are miserable for my father. Last night he ended up with 1.5 liters of fluids, an x-ray, and a new drug for the hiccups. It worked, but the vomiting continued and then things escalated by ten this morning.

While talking with my sister on the telephone, his speech began slurring and his words didn't make sense.

Another long drive to Gunderson with Dad reporting weird mental imagery and thoughts. Questioning revealed he'd taken the generic thorazine earlier on top of the baclofen he'd been given less than twelve hours before.

So while a stroke has to be ruled out, I can't help wondering if the menagery of drugs in his system are interacting in a negative way.

Right now, Dad is back from a CT scan and the investigation continues. EKG time. More to come later.

Later:
Tests show no signs of a stroke with the thorazin being the likely culprit for the disorientation, confusion, shortness of breath, and pounding heart episodes.

However, my father is still spitting up black material in his mucous. Yes, this is the messy side of reporting medical travails. Illness is an organic thing -- sometimes too organic. That mystery needs solving so that he can take in nourishment of some kind.

He'll be held overnight for observation.

I'd be ungrateful if I didn't mention the aid rendered by hospital workers of all stripes and by a friend who came over to give him a blessing. The help has been well appreciated.

Much later:
There are still no rooms available at the hospital and we are still in an ER exam room. Dad is doing better, but he's had no food or drink so we'll see what happens when that is allowed. At least he's catching up on missed sleep.

I wish I could say the same.

Time to recharge the Nook HD.

The Hard Part Has Arrived

Up until Thursday things had been going fairly well, if plagued by exhaustion after a wretched Tuesday where my father bit off more than he could chew on a service call. Moving to the full dosage for the second cycle of chemo meant it was time to start seeing side effects. Out of control acid reflux and hiccups arrived by the end of the week, making it nearly impossible for him to sleep. Yesterday it got worse, a lot worse.

One of the most common side effects of chemotherapy is nausea and vomiting. The latter hit my dad in escalating waves throughout the day with nothing staying down. Not familiar with being ill or with side effects, he’s flailed around blaming other things. Making things worse is that he never associated anti-nausea medication prescribed with the vomiting.

As in since he wasn’t feeling nauseous, he didn’t take the medicine.

Sigh. Between dealing with cluelessness and misery while unable to do anything about it, I’ve been extremely frustrated. At least the hiccups are now under control thanks to an emergency run to pick up a prescription of thorazine yesterday. Apparently it is used for that too, little did I know.

So I’m home, skipping church in order to keep an eye on him. He’s finally found some slumber which makes me hopeful he’ll get over this. Now to wait to see what happens.

One thing that worries me about my father is that he’s not gotten it into his head that he has to fight to win this battle. Instead, he’s been passive. That’s the wrong attitude for surviving any threat. Since I’ve had to fight to function to any degree my entire adult life, I lack empathy when it comes to dealing with non-warrior attitudes. This is something I need to work on.

Endurance Run

Time to report about how my father is doing and just a few minutes before this post was started I had to perform the Heimlich maneuver on him when a cyclovir pill tried to kill him. No, this isn’t an attempt to be humorous.

Fortunately for him, I was in the bathroom next to the kitchen when I heard him choking and found him doubled over. Concerned that his stomach might have perforated, I quickly ascertained that it was simple choking and asked him if he needed me to Heimlich him. A nod was all I needed and I very carefully made an escalating trio of attempts very conscious of the dangers of rupturing the cancer stricken stomach. The third time the pill popped out and he was able to breathe again.

After that, I made sure he was okay and that there was no pain in the abdomen. I’ll be checking periodically, but the force used was carefully measured so I don’t expect complications. Heck of a way to end the day, yet it is consistent with how difficult the entire week has been.

Bitter Cold, Low Blood, and the Beating of Drums

I’ve fallen behind in posting, so I’m throwing together a variety of subjects into this one to save time. Surviving winter has become a priority thanks to another bitter cold snap dubbed a “polar vortex” by the know nothing media. –35 below wind chills along with wood pellet supplies being depleted locally led us to purchasing corn to burn in the pellet stove. Figuring out the rate to feed the kernels to the fire pot has been difficult, but at least we have supplemental heat to offset the incredibly expensive LP gas during this latest cold snap.

Speaking of temperatures, Dad is doing well with the chemotherapy, but his white blood cell count is down so he’s having to monitor his temperature in case of fever. If he runs a high temperature he is to head straight for the emergency room. Other than that, he’s still running me ragged.

Going with the Flow

It has been one week since the initial round of chemotherapy for Dad and he’s survived it with no ill effects other than with my annoyance at how perky he’s been due to the Prednisone. For the moment he has more energy than I do despite the end of that particular course. We’ll see if that pattern holds up deeper into the treatment schedule.

While the battle with cancer continues, it is the siege by forces of winter that has occupied a great deal of our time, energy, and attention the last several days. Local wood pellet shortages combined with an aerial attack of snow resulted in our being forced to fortify our position. Hunkering down has nothing to do with problems getting the car up the driveway despite what the propaganda arm of the forces of tyrannical Jack Frost claim.

Timing

It is said that timing is everything and while I believe that saying has a great deal of truth to it, I’ve always felt that seizing opportunities is far more important. So its been with a little chagrin that I’ve looked back on the last few weeks. Of late, timing really has been everything.

Little did I know that starting a new daily approach to weight training back in December would be critical for me having enough capacity to help my father deal with cancer in February. While my energy levels are only slightly up, the gain in muscle strength makes simple things such as moving around dramatically easier. In essence, I’m able to do more with less.

This is a traditionally slow time of the year for appliance repair, so there is less demand for my father’s services. Yes, this hurts the bottom line when dealing with all the expenses mounting up. However, it means he’s able to take things slowly without feeling guilty about it.

On a less dramatic note, yesterday had a few pleasant surprises for us. Little things working out and even an unexpected bonus of sublime silliness via the Squid Girl OVA’s bundled with graphic novels in Japan suddenly showing up on Crunchyroll. There is nothing like the healing power of laughter in my opinion, thoracic wounds aside. Watching the two episodes made us wish a third season would be made or at least the second being released on DVD or Blu-ray in North America.

Even with timing working out the way it has, I’m not letting go of my faith in making the most of opportunities. Chemotherapy infusion is a long process taking hours, so my sister Ann Marie and I had time to kill. For her, it meant cramming an online course into her head in preparation of taking the Bar exam. In my case, it was a chance to experiment with video conversion the day before so that I could take notes on a movie.

So as the various chemicals dripped into Dad’s veins, I watched a movie on my Nook HD while wearing headphones. Balancing the tablet on one knee and the notebook on the other, I scribbled away with the occasional interruption. Handbrake’s ability to burn subtitles into the video frames themselves made this possible, so you can safely assume the next review is of a foreign film.Of course that only took up two hours or so. Dad read a book on the Cook County hospital and I made headway into To Kingdom Come, an account of the disastrous 1943 bombing raid on Stuttgart. Both books are guaranteed to make you angry at authority, so maybe they aren’t the best reading during a stressful time.

Still, it was not a brain dead room.

Later that night I hooked the Nook HD up to the motel room TV and streamed episodes of Arrow from Flixster to introduce Ann to the series. Worked great until we were bandwidth throttled into oblivion.

Speaking of timing, I need to finish three weeks of unwashed dishes, get a workout in, and start screen capturing. No doubt, something else will come up to interrupt it all…

One Down

The first chemotherapy infusion session was yesterday and five more remain over the next several months. I’ll be watching my father closely for problems and generally to keep him from misbehaving. Since sickness and medicine are new to him, it is more than a simple adjustment. Dad genuinely doesn’t have a clue when it comes to this sort of thing.

Starting out slowly is the adapted treatment method beginning with prednisone first and a reduced dosage of the rest of the RCHOP therapy I wrote about before. Best news was that Dad did so well tolerating the Rituximab that they were able to speed up the delivery allowing us an early escape. In a week or two we’ll be back to get blood work done to measure blood cell counts.

As usual, the staff at Gundersen were impressive. Informative, helpful, and attentive, they kept things going smoothly.

My sister is winging her way back home after an extended visit to accompany him through the opening stages of the treatment. She’s got enough on her plate without having to worry over this, but that cannot be avoided. It’ll be interesting to hear how her eighteen month old daughter handled the absence, what with their longest separation previously being around a day.

Desperately searching for transitions and finding none indicates how tired I am at the moment. Sleeping in a motel room for two nights straight while running around the labyrinthine clinic complex is draining. Then there was eating out, which my digestive system did not like terribly much. I’d say only Hu Hot and Texas Steak House agreed with me, though that says more about my body than all the places we ate.

The latter was a first and I have to recommend their shrimp and rice dish highly. Service was very good too.

Spacing out a bit writing this, so I’ll wrap up. It’s nice to be home and familiar comforts should aid in the healing process for Dad.

Battle Plans

After a very long day at Gundersen Clinic, we finally know just what my dad is facing and how to combat it. A combined PET and CT scan provided a three dimensional map of the tumor involved by the end of the day which in turn helped the hematologist and oncologist involved to come up with a course of treatment. UPDATED with details.

First up, the form of cancer is diffuse large B cell lymphoma that is in stage 2 (out of 4 possible) which means it is still localized. To be more precise, the growth is in the bottom of the stomach, is six centimeters (or 2.5 inches) in diameter and some small lymph nodes nearby it also appear cancerous. It’s a nasty looking thing to view in photos from the recent endoscopy, yet more impressive when the sheer size of the thing is revealed in relation to the rest of my father’s body.

The good news is that this kind of cancer is treatable with an 85% cure rate. Not remission rate, cure rate. It won’t be easy due to dangers of the stomach perforating, but the odds are impressive to me.

The bad news is that chemotherapy will have to go six cycles for a total of eighteen weeks. This will be a long, hard slog. RCHOP is the planned combination of medicines and I’m far too tired to look up all of the ones involved for this post. Side effects are too numerous to list and none of them sound fun. Therapy sessions will run for hours and will be intravenous for the most part. 

Okay, details of the drugs are as follows:

Rituximab, Clyclophosamide, hydroxydaunorubicin,  Oncovin and Prednisone, although the Prednisone will be taken orally.

Hydroxydaunorubicin is the chemical used to make tail lights red on your car.

Cyclophosamide is better known as mustard gas in WWI.

Rituximab is human antibodies targeting system B cells and is cloned in mice.

Oncovin is an alkaloid that blocks cell division.

Prednisone is a commonly used steroid with a variety of applications.

Of course my dad will lose his remaining hair. He’s amused by that, but I’m going to have to find a supply of stocking caps for that bald head.

There’s a lot more we’ll have to be dealing with, however things could be far worse.

Chemotherapy has to begin as soon as possible which made it interesting when we had a whopping five minutes before closing time to arrange a screening test on Monday and the first session the next day. As the receptionist said, it was a miracle when it all came together.

All of this will require huge changes to routines and both of us will have to be very careful of our energy levels. I’ve got to figure out what I have to give up to compensate for the demands of taking care of Dad. As of this moment, I’m too tired to even begin figuring it out.

Winter Woes

This has been an unusually cold winter with days of snow falling nearly as excessive. Thankfully the latter have not resulted in very deep snow, but the wear and tear of the season is getting to be a bit much. At the time of writing it is –16F outside and 65F inside the house.

Thanks to not checking the LP gas levels, we are out and the water pipes are all frozen. It’s simply too soon to have run out of gas under normal circumstances and this demonstrates how ridiculously cold it has been. Now we wait for a snowplow to first come in and then we can get more LP.

The good news is it is supposed to get up to 20F today.  Eventually we will have water again.

A combination of cold and moisture has made the season unbearable at night for my father and me. Since it is the perfect weather to make joints ache, we’ve had a difficult time getting restful sleep.

This is a small concern given what else is going on.

After losing far too much weight in the past few months since his auto rollover, my father finally went in for tests last Wednesday. They found a large ulcerous tumor and we just got the results of the biopsies this morning. It’s cancer of a lymphoma type and chemotherapy is going to be required rather than surgery.

All we can do is deal with the situation as it unfolds.

Something Wicked This Way Comes (1983) Review

A dark and brooding look at the sinful desires that corrupt people is not what you would expect out of Disney as a theater goer in the early Eighties. Yet that is exactly what this movie is. When a strange carnival named Dark's Pandemonium arrives at a small town, harrowing encounters with Dark and his minions follow. Soon the lives of the townsfolk are on the line, if not their very souls.  Filled with horror, regrets, and menace the movie is ultimately about fathers and sons. UPDATED January 2014 with better screen captures and completely rewritten text.

The late Seventies had not been kind to the Walt Disney company at the box office. In an attempt to regain lost audiences the studio had been moving more toward the serious side in their films; starting in 1979 with The Black Hole and the dollowing year with The Watcher in the Woods. 1982 was supposed to be the year of big change with the experimental TRON and this gothic movie hitting theaters to revitalize the company’s box office success.

Alas, that plan fell apart due to a disastrous test screening that led to reshoots a year later designed to make the movie more acceptable to a family audience. However, those changes did not change the movie enough and the end result was still a dark and terrifying movie that was guaranteed to give small kids nightmares.

BBS Memories

After reading an article at Ars Technica reminiscing about calling dial up bulletin boards with a 2400 baud modem, I’ve been trying to remember details of those days. Twenty years of the Web have erased most of those memories to my disappointment. Even remembering names of the BBSs I frequented escapes me.

What I do remember is mainly concentrating my attentions on an OS/2 board near the end of my long distance calling days. At that point, America Online had become my main destination and so the primitive ANSI based boards were on the way out, not only for me but for most users. I wish I could remember the board’s name that has slipped so easily from my personal memory banks.

TRON: Legacy (2010) Review

A surprisingly beautiful and layered movie that vastly improves upon the original film in every possible way. While the action is spectacular, the real story is both a social commentary and variation on the prodigal son. Filled with extraordinary imagery, kinetic action, and good acting, it may not have been the smash success Disney envisioned it succeeded in being thought provoking and very, very entertaining. UPDATED December 2011 for Blu-ray review and HD screen captures, January 2013 for technical details.

I’m old enough to have seen the original TRON in a movie theater and always had a soft spot in my heart for it.  Disney’s experiment wasn’t a great movie, but was a passable B movie with an A level budget.   Still, it was great fun and interesting to look at with an equally interesting soundtrack.  28 years later, the sequel arrived in 3D during a disappointing winter box office.  So did it live up to the hype?

TRON: Legacy starts with a lasers forming the outline of the Walt Disney Pictures Enchanted Castle which is a nice touch. This was in 3D at the theater; the screen captures in the review come from the Blu-ray so I may be a bit fuzzy about where 2D and 3D transitioned. Lines of blue light follow, tracing circuit patterns that become city streets while Jeff Bridges voice is heard talking about “The Grid.” It is a very pretty sequence indicative of things to come.

The year is 1989 and widower Kevin Flynn (Jeff Bridges) is telling his seven year old son, Sam, about getting into The Grid in the first movie. TRON and CLU are mentioned as helping him build The Grid and a promise is made to take Sam there one day. But something big has happened, a “miracle” and for the moment the boy has to stay put. Another promise is made and Flynn leaves to work on his project.

Life Is Like a Boat

Full of waves that bob us up and down, the water we sail on through life is rarely calm for any lengthy amount of time. The past eight days have not been still, but have not been tempest tossed either. Illness has been part of the downs of my life during this period. Most of them in fact.

Mostly bedridden to start out the week, it felt like I lost a month of things needing doing rather than days. On the other hand, a few good things happened that ranged from the mundane scoring of cheap DVDs at Alco to meeting with a congressional candidate that my father has been pitching tax reforms to.

On the negative side, somebody knocked our new mailbox off its post in the middle of the night. Tire tracks showed it wasn’t either of the snow plows, but a smaller vehicle that hit the post. The hill it fell down is very steep and treacherous, so I had to wait until I was feeling better to retrieve it from the snow. Thankfully, total body weight routines help with balance far more than I realized.

So things weren’t oppressively dull.

I did lose five days straight on weight training, but bobbed back to higher levels of pounds pressed. Things went swimmingly until yesterday, when pain induced sleep deprivation combined with upper respiratory issues made for a difficult day at church. Teaching adult Sunday school to a room filled with professionals from all walks of life and two thirds of the stake presidency while brain dead is not recommended.

My beloved Hoist V2 home gym did not get used as it was beyond my physical stamina after church. Today started out equally poorly, but somewhere after Noon rolled around, I became functional again. Before and after sessions of Pinball FX 2 verified I wasn’t imagining this and so I got to workout again.

One must adjust to the ups and downs of life or risk the chance of developing lifesickness, the equivalent of being seasick but more disorienting and disheartening. With less throwing up, I hope. Knowing that waves always go up and down is a big part of developing the emotional sea legs needed to cope with life. Not that I’m always on an even keel.

If my friends could have seen me ranting at the cats, the computer, and the world in general while being very ill Monday, they would have been shocked. An unusual combination of sickness, exhaustion from CFS, and high pain had me worse than the normally surly attitude I exhibit when ill. Of course, this passed and life went on.

Feeling better allows me to appreciate things properly, such as the beautiful song the post title was taken from. Here’s a live performance of Life Is Like a Boat by Rie Fu:

Simply lovely tune.

This song was the end theme for the first season of the anime Bleach and I’ll always fondly associate it with the character Rukia. I think you’ll find it stands on its own perfectly well.