Waiting

It is a dreary Sabbath day with gray skies and the promise of rain returning as I type this post. Dad hit rock bottom in a sudden turn on Friday that led to another visit to the emergency room on Saturday for a bag of saline to deal with dehydration. With the full liquid diet becoming unbearable to him due to no appetite or will power, a feeding tube will need to be surgically inserted some time this week. Monday is the day we’ll know when.

Malnutrition is causing problems, ranging from swollen feet to an inability to keep warm. We were fortunate that the oncology specialist handling my father’s case happened to be on call this weekend and the doctor on duty ran into him. Since the endoscopy results show the cancer completely gone, the remaining two chemotherapy sessions may be halved in dosage or even dispensed with. Prednisone will be removed from the RCHOP no matter what is decided.

Fiddling About the Edges

When one has a chronic illness, especially something that saps all energy like CFS, they need to find small things to do to keep from going stir crazy. For me, that's usually playing video games. What to do when even that is hard?

Well, I'm tweaking old review posts in an effort to clean up the formatting and tell search engines not to follow internal links. A small experiment at having an automated list making widget back on the blog produced the results I expected, that being a drop in search engine presence. Google may claim that the nofollow attribute is only needed in some cases, but it looks to me that they punish internal linking far more than they say.

I'd toyed with changing the links for some time so this was simply a tedious endeavor requiring time and no creativity. Something that requires no brain cells firing? Perfect for how I feel at the moment!

Well, that and dish washing which is weeks worth now. But that takes more energy. Like Pa Kettle, I'll get around to it one of these days.

Notes for the next review are nearly complete, so I'm on schedule there despite all the interruptions, crises, and exhaustion. Still need to do more work on the Sunday school lesson coming up in several days.

Life goes on.

Time Isn't Flying

Once again a long day at Gundersen has begun, with an endoscopy about to be performed on my father. Like all things medical, preparation and paperwork take up hours before the main event. These days, I've come to believe this is more draining than the more dramatic events.

After the procedure is over, we'll have a much clearer picture of what needs to be done to get his stomach functioning correctly again. An update to this post will cover the results of the exploration.

UPDATE: While final results and analysis have yet to be given, the pictures indicate that the opening of the stomach into the small intestine is tiny. Once again it was impossible to pass through it for a deeper look, this time due to the opening being far too rigid to pass anything by. This would fit with the scar tissue theory.

Biopsy samples were taken for CMV culturing. Initial suggestion is a feeding tube inserted into the small intestine, but Dad wants to continue trying the full liquid diet. Hopefully more will be decided once all the data is in.

The last few days have been particularly hard due to the ongoing nutritional issues and growing difficulties with Dad's behavior. Irrational outbursts and fuzzy reasoning has made him a handful to deal with. I'm being run into the ground in the process.

Side effect of medication mixed with poor sleep and no real food is not a good combination. I suspect many a family member or caretaker have gone through this hidden cost of cancer. Severe illness affects far more people than just the one struck ill.

In the end, all you can do is endure and try to help. The hardest part is learning when the loved one is not fully in control of their faculties. They certainly aren't able to tell themselves, so conflict is guaranteed.

So much forgiveness is required. Patience will get exhausted eventually, so forget about relying on that exclusively to get through things.

Godzilla (1998) Review

Radioactive Rage Month continues with the most controversial incarnation of Godzilla. When popcorn movie makers Roland Emmerich and Dean Devlin got their hands on the first American attempt at the world’s most famous giant lizard, a disaster of epic proportions unfolded much to the horror of onlookers. By that, I mean the audience, not the characters in the story.

DISCLAIMER: Due to repeated viewings of the subject matter, the author of this review may have suffered permanent brain damage and cannot be held accountable for any ranting, denials of reality, or other acts of insanity that follow.

The horror… the horror…

With the winding up of the Heisei era series of Godzilla films, Toho Studios licensed out the big green ‘G’ to star in a big budget Hollywood version. Multiple directors bailed on the project due to the constraint of keeping the budget to $100,000,000. Eventually Roland Emmerich (Universal Soldier, Independence Day, Stargate) agreed to make the movie for that amount as long as he was allowed to do whatever he wanted. Tristar agreed to the terms and production began.

This is what is commonly referred to as “a mistake.”

Heavily hyped to the public, high expectations were generated after the smash hit Jurassic Park proved that large lizards could be made to look both realistic and terrifying thanks to advances in computer generated (CG) effects. I remember it well, for speculation on message boards was rampant thanks to the rise of the Internet. Secrecy was maintained well during production and what little info leaked slowly began to worry long time Godzilla buffs.

We weren’t alarmed enough, it turned out. Time to gird my loins, abandon my sanity, and write this review.

The horror… the horror…

April Snow

Looking out the window this morning brought an unwelcome sight – almost two inches of snow. Tufts of greening grass poke out of the unwanted frozen H2O lit by the glare from a gray sky. This is not the spring renewal I ordered. Unfortunately, there is a no refund policy when it comes to weather.

So far the Easter season hasn’t gotten off to a positive start, what with Russian militia types shooting people in eastern Ukraine and a white supremacist (neo-Nazi) murdering people at two Jewish community centers in Kansas City yesterday. Both are fulfillments of aggression I’ve watched build up on the Net for some time.

The latter bothers me the most, probably due to the proximity of Passover. Lately I’ve seen an escalation of Jew bashing amongst the thirty and under set online that has grown out of control. A lot of it came out of the OWS rhetoric that went mainstream blaming all the financial woes on Jewish bankers. Sound familiar? It should if you know the history of the 1920s and ‘30s.

The biggest red flag has been seeing caricatures of Jews being posted on message boards that looks straight out of Nazi and Muslim propaganda. These aren’t boards devoted to politics or religion, but entertainment. It tells me that hatred and dehumanizing of Jews has begun in earnest again.

Dad is miserable and becoming a cantankerous handful to deal with due to it. He’s even skipping medications when he feels he can’t drink enough food to allow them to be ingested. To say this isn’t good is an understatement, but there is nothing that can be done about it since reason is not accepted by him.

My health hasn’t been great the past week, even by my lowly standards. Returning cold temperatures the last few days has been a trial for us both. Damaging the ability to sleep does is not conducive to healing rest.

I’ve also taken brain damage from watching the first all American attempt at Godzilla from 1998. While taking notes I could feel my IQ lowering by the minute and if I’m lucky it only dropped to double digits. Because I have to take screen captures and listen to the commentary track, the odds of becoming a drooling idiot by the end of the day are rather high.

On with the dreary day…

Easter 2014

Easter arrived here with storms and gloom preparing the way for Palm Sunday. The weather wrought pain throughout my body making a restful night impossible. So no church today. Is it any wonder that I feel some sympathy, perhaps even empathy for Jesus Christ today?

The hurt doesn’t even begin to match what He went through, yet it does focus my thoughts on the events that happened nearly two thousand years ago in a less clinical way than usual. There has been a running thread of sympathy for Satan in popular culture ranging from Milton’s Paradise Lost to the Rolling Stones Sympathy for the Devil. Where is the sympathy for Jesus, I wonder?

For all its inaccuracy, gore and blood fetishism, The Passion of the Christ did attempt just that ten years ago and became a phenomenon as a result. But that was a unique occurrence that came out of an independent movement outside of the media mainstream and is not likely to be repeated. The chosen few who rule the culture have no interest in morals, commandments, and redemption. Religion is something to me mocked and suppressed at all turns now.

Getting back to Easter, the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints has an interesting page up on the meaning of Easter. I like how it is presented and think it well represents the fundamental rule of missionary work, which is to keep things uncomplicated, accurate, and loving. You won’t find fire and brimstone there for Christ’s mission was one of salvation, not damnation.

The live chat questions from that page are something I’d like to answer in this post, since they are rather good queries.

Gojira (1984) Review

aka The Return of Godzilla aka Godzilla 1985

Radioactive Rampage Month continues with Godzilla’s come back film from the 1980s. Ditching the continuity of all the previous films except the original 1954 classic, this movie featured much ballyhooed new technology and a more serious take marked a new beginning for the franchise. Introducing a bigger, badder, and more feral incarnation of giant lizard, it was a marked departure from the kids films of the 1970s.

When 1975’s Terror of MechaGodzilla performed badly at the box office, it marked the end of two decades of Godzilla flicks. Toho Studios shelved the franchise and years went by until a resurgence in domestic interest in the radioactive kaiju prompted them to develop a new film. Oh there had been proposals and treatments created in the interim, but being in the business of making money the execs wanted to make sure there would be an audience.

Taking advantage of the fading memories of the last film meant they could now move in a new direction with a starting point from the first film. What they came up with was a direct sequel to the 1954 movie and far more serious than the aliens invading using large monsters storyline rut of the ‘70s. However, elements of the prior silliness are still present in this overly verbose story filled with Cold War paranoia.

This review is of the original Japanese version. I’ve never seen the American cut with Raymond Burr and am forced to wonder whether or not his pipe co-starred with him again like in Godzilla, King of the Monsters.