Dear blog,

I am quite busy, so not blogging often. There is little to note. I do not feel well, with a cold, but no so unwell that I cannot get chemo tomorrow. I am due for chemo on Thanksgiving day. I must decide whether to go short or go long. Pros and cons to each. If I go long, the whole process will run longer as a result. If I go short, I miss the break. Same for finals week. That's the long and short of it.

"...has this experienced changed you perspective on how you want to live your life? Has it affected your feelings about death or changed your opinions about anything like health ins. or capital punishment or anything like that?"

In short, no. I feel like I was living a fairly full life before the risk of truncation became more solid before my eyes. I have been impelled to read a few books I was meaning to read, but nothing other than that. So while many find God or realize they have wasted so much time or whatever, I did not find or realize anything to that effect.

And in regards to health insurance, my opinion has not changed. My personal opinion is that in an era of such abundance: that there should be produced each year enough grain to feed the world; that individuals exist who pay in property tax the net income of entire villages over generations; that even one adult has the liberty to choose to purchase a large house between his other two houses so that he need not stop at a hotel driving from one to the other; in this world, it is unthinkably immoral and corrupt of anyone to believe I should be bankrupt because I rolled unlucky at the cancer craps table. I think it unfathomably disgusting now, now that I am facing the cruel reality of sitting near people whose surplus of wealth would handily end every financial woe I possess, knowing that if I even mentioned the disparity to them that they would merely cough uncomfortably and attempt to part company. I thought it unfathomably disgusting that such pairings existed before I was in one.

Frankly, it's enough to make any upright citizen sick if they think about it long enough. So now, as then, I try not to think about it.

Regards,
Ian Hogan.

$\ iff$ X is compact

Dear blog,

Naturally the title is referring to the fact that ultra-filters converge in compact spaces. (Makes sense right? They're compact. There's no infinity to go to.)

Ok, so most of you aren't mathies. Most of you are interested, perhaps nominally, in my state of existence viz. how many pieces of bad news am I from death; perhaps aesthetically in some sort of well-structured (insofar as none of you realize I'm practically illiterate) prose. Clarification: early one morning I grunted at an old man who had said hello. He asked me if I was 'even alive yet', prolly referring to a lack of coffee. I think I said no, a clever response requiring coffee, but then pondered the question more deeply (while waiting for the pot to fill with coffee). In said meditation, I decided it was possible metrize state of alive-ness by how many pieces of bad news I am from death. The most alive is 3 I think.
1) You have cancer;
2) The treatment isn't working;
3) There's nothing we can do.
Given that I have recently received (1) I rated myself as 2 on the metric.

This is all pretty silly and I'm sure any of you with some thought would come up with far more elegant metrics. I encourage you to do so as an ice-breaker at parties. Anywhat, I think I may be back up to 3 as of today, depending how one reads the metric.

I have received a negative PET scan. (Technical language follows, please skim this bit of wikipedia) What does this mean? Roughly it means that what cancer remains is insufficiently active to make the screen light up. There is certainly still some cancer, potentially alive and weak or too small to register on the scan. Thus I must continue treatment until December as planned.

That's really all the cancer news that's important. On to more frivolous matters. Comments. I got a bunch. Splendid. Better though was that one of them had several questions. Questions are good. Answering questions is fun and easy. I will endeavor to answer at least 1 with each post. If more questions are posed, the rate of answering will increase.

"Like, what all goes on in the chemo room?" Remarkably little, though I suppose answering will end up burning a lot of space. "...the chemo room" is a little incorrect. There is an "oncology and infusion" wing or department or flat, whatever you like. It is attached the the general hospital (ER, crap like that) by way of a hall. It consists of a front desk and waiting room (for when they are full or haven't finished whatever state-mandated prep they have to do in the morning) which is shared with cardiology, and a devoted piece of building with a central, partly open, partly walled room with desks and faxes and the like where nurses sit while they do paper work and scheduling and so forth, some halls around that central room with a few private inspection rooms (or whatever, they have the padded table and that's where the doc feels you up), two private infusion rooms and at least the doctors private office if not a few more offices that I cannot look at because they might be around a corner I have no access to...and a big room with a bunch of chemo chairs and televisions. Certainly more than a kiosk, certainly less than a Sears.

A chemo chair is a well padded chair that reclines quite a lot for comfort with an IV stand next to it. The main room has 6 chairs and two televisions which typically air soaps. A person sitting in one of those chairs is first given a nominal evaluation, blood pressure, temperature and heart rate and is asked if they're feeling alright. If all that is a go, they typically proceed to put some fluids in you by some means for some purpose. Those means are limited (a stick in the arm or a stick in a port), but the purposes and fluids are many and varied. Most of them are blood (supplements to those whose counts are low) and drugs (either to treat cancer to to mitigate the effects of the ones treating the cancer). The IV stand is on wheels because you will have to pee. Not might, will. They not only encourage you to show up as loaded as possible to make it easy to find veins and so forth, but most of the drugs come blended in water which your body decides it doesn't need immediately after sifting it from the drugs.

Anyway, like I said, once whatever treatment is a go you do whatever it is you do to avoid eye-contact with the other ill people with needles leading eerily to tubes and pouches of poison and strangers' blood and such for several hours until you feel like crap and they let you go home. I personally wear ear-plugs to blot out the damn TV and try to study until the chemo turns off my brain (at which point I will continue to be as studious as a gold-finch for 100 hours approx.). The IV machines (they don't drip, they force) beep quite often and nurses bustle out to see why they're beeping. Half the time the machine is claiming "air in line" when there isn't any and the other half they're claiming they're done with the pouch and to please hang up a new pouch. Maybe half of those times they're actually done, the other half the nurse tells it to keep going.

I think that's about it. Until next time,
-Ian Hogan.