The Assorted, Sorted

Scanxiety. Isn't it amazing the new words you get to learn when after you've had a cancer diagnosis? Even if they are potentially suspect neologisms. In an effort to prevent YOUR anxiety, I'll not bury the lede. Jess and I travelled to OHSU in Portland to do another CT scan. The news from that scan is that I still have no evidence of disease and the dead tumor is still shrinking. Another 2 cm leaving it at 7.5 cm in size. My blood tumor marker dropped precipitously. That number is apparently a lagging indicator, so much like looking at stars in the sky, you're sort of seeing the past rather than seeing life (or in this case, death of cells) as it is now. Hot damn. The scan was fast and simple. The blood test not so much, more of a cattle call, but whatever. The plan is, for Dr. Strother, for me to be on the 3-month plan going forward. I’m going to tell you, and Jess and echo this, that getting a scan after you’re “better” seems worse than when you’re in active treatmen...

Double Tap Sorry to lead with this image, but I felt it was relevant.   Let's get right to it.  If you are in a horror film, never count on the killer or monster to be dead. Just when you think that he's been vanquished, he or she springs back to life for one more strangle, stab, or bite. Though the concept may be older, it was first brought to serious light in the Horror-Comedy Zombieland. (Which may be the second-best zombie-comedy movie after Shaun of the Dead.) Want to make sure that the zombie is going to come back and bite you or eat your brain? Double-tap. Shoot it a second time just to be sure.  I am now officially in a "season of rest" as Jessica has put it with regards to my cancer safari. Doctors seemed confident enough to say that I didn't need a scan again until the end of July, a little more than three months after my previous scan. As an aside, if you haven't been reading the news lately , (click on the link) there has been some linking of CT sc...

"I thought I could do it," I said.  I could not .  The year is 2025 and we've just done our first wine tasting since my diagnosis and treatment for liver cancer. Well, Jessica tasted the wine, and I watched. It mirrored a very similar event almost 11 years earlier. It's 2014, and I have just met my future wife, Jessica. We've dated a few times, but this is going to be different. We were going WINE TASTING. I knew nothing about wine. Well, nothing substantial. Wine equaled grape juice gone bad. Something that you got for a fancy occasion.  "Three Buck Chuck" or  Manischewitz for communion at church until they got all fancy and used "good" wine. Wine was not a means to an end. Or an end. It was just there, and not very there at all. In 2014, I had already live 42 years on this planet and had probably only consumed a grand total of maybe 20 gallons of alcoholic beverages, with the lions' share of that being beer. That's  160 pints of beer...

I've been fighting a chess bot named "Li," who is ostensibly from Taiwan. Rated at 2000, I would say that it's an accurate statement that this level of play is quite challenging for me. I have now beaten Li once out of 17 games. One of those 17 games was a draw, so I guess I have a record of not losing 11.76% of the time. Those aren't great odds. Below is the winning game against Li. Real chess players will see this is an UGLY win, not elegant at all. But a win's a win, right?    At this point in the experience, the only way that I can beat a bot is to make as few mistakes as possible and be ready when it does. Clearly these are programmed into the algorithm so that they make for a more human-like competitor.  On Chess.com, these are considered Advanced competitors.  I have "Charles," "Fatima," "Manuel," and "Oscar" before I reach into the master bot territory. My strategy, though I don't know smart it is, is to...

I have chosen to scrap what I originally was going to write.  It was about spring and rebirth. I was going to tie it in to the good news about my tumor and my recovery. It was about appreciating the extension of my life which I have most likely gotten.  But I killed it dead.  Why, in the face of all of this good news, am I killing positivity? Because sometimes “good news” doesn’t feel like it. It’s just a reminder that it’s still good news about the thing that’s still likely to kill you.  A delayed death sentence is still a death sentence.  Jess and I are in Las Vegas for a long weekend, visiting her friend who lives here. We’ve eaten out at some truly wonderful restaurants. For free because Jess’s friend’s boyfriend was comped meals because of his job. I had a delightful fancy fried chicken one night, and steak the next. We went to the Atomic Museum. And MeowWolf. And gambled with money that Jess’s dad gave us so we couldn’t feel guilty about losing our own. It...

Here's something a little different. Jess and I had a day off from work after conferences (well, technically SHE had a day off because I'm still not working.) Regardless, I had an appointment with my cancer counselor in the afternoon. She's pretty good, and also, her services are provided free by the hospital for cancer patients. "Let's stop for a drink at <coffee shop redacted> on the way," Jess said. So we did, and this transpired:  Okay, at the time, I was feeling a bit spicy because the kid didn't seem to be the paragon of customer service that I expected from the <name redacted chain> of coffee stands, phone never leaving his line of sight. Because of this, I lied and said I was going to my oncologist, rather than "cancer counselor." Otherwise, it was completely true. What you don't see is Jessica right next to me stifling a laugh. Ah well. We're not always nice all the time, are we? 

When I was first diagnosed with my cancer, I wasn’t diagnosed officially. I was told that there was a “spot” on my liver, which Tillamook hospital labeled as 2-3 centimeters. For those in Imperial Measurement Land, that’s about 3/4” - 1 1/8”. I think that can be accurately called a “spot.” Of course just having anything growing on an internal organ isn’t particularly awesome. It’s scary. Jessica and I worked very hard to convince the medical industrial complex and my home doctor that I needed a biopsy to determine what was actually going on. A “spot” could be a benign cyst that wasn’t cancerous, but rather something else. That’s what we were hoping for. But hopes and reality are oftentimes not in alignment with each other.  Eventually I was able to get my biopsy and the more definitive news that punctuation matters. It turns out that a medical error had been made, and the measurement of my tumor (which indeed turned out to be cancerous, <boo, hiss>) was instead 23 cm . Again,...