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.