A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again

Dear blog,

The title is a rip-off from David Foster Wallace, an exposé on Cruises. It's not the best choice. Cancer isn't supposedly fun. However, I was reminded of the title by today's oncology experience.

I got a bone marrow biopsy today. Location: pelvis; right, rear entry. They numbed the skin and deep tissue with lidocaine, but there is no way to numb a bone. The doctor's description was that there would be pulling that would feel like pain for a minute that is not actually pain. A supposedly painless procedure. It's pain. Don't let them snow you. It felt like he was tapping a big part of my pelvis with a chisel. It was, however, a minute, and not more.

Bone marrow biopsy, while conscious, is on the list of things I never want to do again. It's a short list, getting longer with the new experiences I'm coming into with the cancer thing.

(1) I never want to do something I did, that hurt, and don't feel like sharing right now. It was a long time ago.

(2) I never want to be significantly overweight again. Ever. I'd become a drug addict before I ate to excess.

(3) I never want a doctor to stick 5 needles in my neck while conscious again. That was 1 lidocaine, 2 fine needle aspiration biopsy and 2 fine needle for flow test. The fact that none of them were diagnostic doesn't really add great positivity to my view here.

(3 1/2) (Cheers to Tychonov, I literally thought of this after writing (4)) I never want to get a bill that should be sent to insurance, call billing, call insurance, call billing, be told it's ok, get a second notice on the bill two weeks later and call billing, again. Tough luck on that, It'll probably be next month at the latest for that funzy game.

(4) I never want a bone marrow biopsy while conscious again. They said I wouldn't need one in conjunction with this cancer again. However, I know I'm at greater risk of getting this and other cancers later in life as a result of the ravages of treatment. I will probably ask to be put under if they start talking about needles in bones again.

The CT scan I got last Thursday is back. My spleen is enlarged and suspicious. The largest diameter of lymph nodes is 5.8 cm. Over 10 is what they call, if I'm not recalling incorrectly, "clumpy", and of different concern. So none of that. No nodes appeared in the pelvic scan. Some nodes in the chest were discovered, not surprising, and in the abdomen, also not very surprising. The easiest blood test in the world also came back; sedimentation rate. My rate is 97%. Bad is over 50%, some say 30%. This is not surprising given my fevers and night sweats-> indications of systemic involvement. This information taken into account, I am at least stage:
3B. If the marrow is infected (affected, I dunno), it'll be 4B, the latest and greatest.

I got straight A's though. If I pull that off on chemo this fall, I go to whatever PhD program I want. At least, I think I should be able to. I might get a port put in. That's a large vein temporary access port. That needs to be discussed more.

That's all for now. Bye bye,
Ian Hogan.

Tests Tests Tests

Dear blog,

Hurray, hurray, hurray, we got all kinds of tests. Not one blood sample but 4 blood samples! That's 20 ml (just 1 vein!). It's total madness. Two scans for the price of 2. We're checking marrow and heart and lungs. Does your body contain a specific organ or fluid of some kind? WE WILL EVALUATE!!!

Anyway, staging evidently involves many tests. I got CT, PET, blood work, ecg (simultaneous lung function test), bone marrow and semen analysis all scheduled or being scheduled for this and next week. Doc said this process should be fast. I asked him to define fast.

Fast is pretty quick, it seems.
-Ian Hogan.

(After Having Written: Nodes I thought I felt aren't worrisome. Nodes I couldn't find were found. I'll call it even.)

Medicine is Borke

Dear blog,

I have some updates, but you get the griping with them. Gripe:

So here's how medical doctors do most things, it seems to me. Well, perhaps we'll do the "not most" or "some things" part because that's the cool part. Not most of the time, they remove things from you what ought not be there and cure you. Yay medical doctors. Most of the time, they recognize that something ought not be there and prescribe a treatment. Exit medical doctor, enter nurse, nurses, pharmacist or combination thereof.

Logical conclusion: You see a doctor anywhere, and get treated anywhere. Right? Wrong. The hospital won't treat you until you see THEIR doctor.

"Oh, when is YOUR doctor available to prescribe the same textbook treatment as MY doctor?"

Answer: a month an a half. I'm shocked, and that does not happen often. Well, say I, I have a fast moving cancer. None of that non-Hodgkins watchful waiting, prostate cancer what takes more than 10 years to kill you. Nay, I got happening, shaking up the dance floor Hodgkin's Lymphoma. Now when is YOUR doctor available?

A month and a week. They'll pull some strings to knock off a week. The actual update without gripe (maybe). I got an appointment for Monday (that I said last blues time, last blues hour), with an oncologist at Holzer. Holzer does not treat. Holzer's oncologist's patients get treated in Lancaster and Gallipolis. My home is roughly equidistant from each, 100 kilometers approximately. I would like to get treatment in Athens, at O'bleness Hospital (a mere 4.5 miles from my abode (a distance I hope to be able to bike even while being treated)), but they, as I griped, will not give me poison until their doctor sees fit that they do.

The plan: I will see the oncologist in Holzer on Monday. He will still be able to get the ball rolling on getting me staged, which since it is a brief process, I will be willing to go to Gallipolis to do it (I've been to Lancaster three times to try to get biopsies of my lymph nodes with no success before skipping one more out to Columbus. They say I'm young and should see the world. Hence, Gallipolis for the staging). I will see the Fancy Shmancy O'bleness oncologist three weeks later and bring diagnosis, staging and prescribed treatment from the Holzer oncologist and try to get him to say "Yea" so that I can be treated at O'bleness (the close one).

Constituent to the plan: (Does constituent mean what I think it means?...yes. Moving on.) I have scheduled an appointment to have my constituent part of any potential offspring analyzed up in Cleveland for the week after finals when I will be free to go up there. Cleveland clinic is the closest cryo facility to me, and the folks live there 'bouts and so on. Since Hodgkin's is a sterilizing disease, I need to get it analysed before paying my mother's hard earned dollars freezing it. No point freezing empty samples. Yeah?

Nigh identical constituent to the plan. I have made sure that Lakewood Hospital (near Cleveland) is on my insurance's preferred provider list so that I do some of the staging stuff up there. I know hospitals will take referred CT scans without pulling the "our doc first" line from experience. Hopefully I can get blood work done down in Athens or up in Lakewood and not have to make any trips to Gallipolis at all. But I've never been there. See the world, you know?

I don't know. I guess I'll find out.
-Ian Hogan.

Cancer

Dear blog,

Today is Wednesday. Last Wednesday I was diagnosed with Hodgkin's lymphoma. I have had it for over a year.

People are curious about the changes involved, and some want to be updated about future changes that will happen in the future. After-all, the future is where we will all spend the rest of our lives. Many folks think they know best about these things and have informed me that I should create a website through such and such and take this and do that and blah blah. I will do what the oncologist says, with the possible exception of skipping the anti-nausea drugs if they make me lose focus. Otherwise, why create a new device for relating change when life is change and I already have such a vessel?

I will post changes here, where change is the status quo and those interested may follow. I have an appointment with an oncologist next Monday, June 4 at 9 A.M. at Holzer Clinic, at the end of the bike path in Athens, Ohio. He will likely schedule me for CT scans of roughly everything to determine the spread of the disease. After that he will probably prescribe combination radiation and chemotherapy.

I will spend the summer sick and tired, practicing Algebra, guitar, piano and German, to help prepare for spending the fall semester sick and tired; teaching 1.5 times as much as a result of the quarters to semesters switch; and taking Algebra, Analysis and Coding, 6000 levels all.

Til Birnam Wood,
-Ian Hogan.

Leben Ist Pumpkin Pie

Dear blog,

Not long ago (perhaps a week) I noticed canned pumpkin and condensed milk in the lazy Susan of my landlord's shared kitchen and decided to make some good old pumpkin pie. It gave me an excuse to use the pastry crust recipe I had seen on the Food channel that very morning (mix butter, flour and water, roll out). I checked for all the other ingredients my old Betty Crocker New Cook Book listed; sugar, eggs, cinnamon, nutmeg, et al. There was no nutmeg, but there was ALLSPICE which said on it, "use in pumpkin pie..." so I used that instead of nutmeg.

The only thing missing; a pie pan. We own nary a pie tin, pan or even so much as an 8 in round baking tray, so I made 12 miniature pumpkin pies in the muffin pan we do have. I used a fairly large cup to cookie cutter the pastry dough into appropriate sized circles to line each muffin mcdivvit.

Et voila, I ate them all. Quite tasty, if only I had whipped cream. I took a picture, but as most of the pictures I take, it will sit lonely on my camera for a requisite aging period of some months.

I am proud of the experience. Because I google searched pumpkin pie muffins; and every single recipe I found, did not use pastry dough, but used paper muffin cups! LAZY SUSANS, THE LOT OF YE!!

Vivian described the pastries to her frat siblings, who all agreed that twice the quantity should be donated to their bake sale. I get brownie points for helping Vivian get "philanthropy hours" We discover the morning after that a total of 4 people had offered to bring baked goods. Perhaps we should have octupled the recipe.

I made a pumpkin pie loaf each time with extra filling. "At last, a luscious grape."
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aAFQ5kUHPkY

Sincerely,
-Ian Hogan

Breathing is Nice

Dear Blog,

Breathing is nice. It's one of the few things I can count on just now too. My phone died. My laptop died. My headlights died. Someone who had been a best friend kicked me out and we aren't speaking anymore. The only administration I have to depend on right now (other than Obama) is giving me eight separate middle fingers at once. Central State requires a variety of courses to graduate. I need four more math, two more education, and student teaching. Only two of the maths are being offered at feasible times. They are being offered in the same time slot. That time slot conflicts with the only offering of one of the education courses. These are the easy problems to deal with.

The other two courses are only being offered while I student teach, so the dean of Education (who is acting as my adviser until they hire a new chair and a math ed adviser) directed me to institutions which have an agreement with Central for instant and free transfer. One is Wright State, they offer the classes at the exact same times. One is Sinclair, it's a community college and doesn't offer the classes. The last is University of Dayton, they're actually not offering one of the classes until fall 2010. However, I have made progress with their department chair who is an expert in my field of interest with regards to one of the four math classes.

The two classes which conflict lead me to the head of the math department, Mr. Marcus. Rather than fix the problem, he identified several others and said he'd get back to me. Namely, the pre-requisites which I had been filling, are not necessary, the professor for one of the classes is teaching it wrong and needs to be consulted on content covered, and the engineering department, which is bigger, needs it moved to another semester anyway (differential equations).

My phone will either not transmit my voice or not send any data either way. My laptop won't accept AC power. My headlights won't turn on, which could be related to the toggle stick, which broke off a while back but still worked if you jiggled it right.

I did mad. I did desperate. Now all I can do is laugh.

breathing is nice,
-Ian Hogan.

Winter Breeze

Dear blog,

Reviewing my last entry, it is both too long ago and missing probably the biggest, or at least most far reaching, life changes that happened in the window of time covered. A) I lost forty pounds. I'm continuing to lose weight, though much more slowly and with lots of little back slides along the way. I can bench 225 and do a chin-up. I can feel my ribs. It's all very new to me. B) I want to have children. Fun little story there.

Family reunion on the fourth of July weekend 2008 (how could I have forgotten to mention this in the last entry, I do not know). My second cousin Sahara, she was seven then, and the cutest kid you can imagine. She wanted to see a bird's nest in a pine tree about six feet and some inches off the ground. I was conscripted as the one with the necessary strength to elevate her. I could have held her at arm's length for minutes at a time, she was so small.

“Say thank you,” reminded the mother.

“Thank you,” said Saraha.

“Shit, I want kids,” said my broken brain.

And if I was impressed with three weeks last summer, I'm about to hit three months with my current girlfriend. I could ramble all day on the subject, but I think I'll keep it to “we met at church as kids, we held hands on the second date and kissed on the third.” The rest, is history. Also worth mentioning that our families have friendship ties all over the place, so no meeting the parents situations have occurred.

School with a long distance relationship is new. School with any relationship is new, actually. I'm getting by alright, but weekends are my only real spurts of proper happiness. Even then, I've never been happy weekend after weekend for months at a time before. It's like my ribs.

I've kept up on my chain-mail weaving. I just finished a vest for my friend Lionell. People think we're strange. Hallie is next on the list, and then Vivian, and then someone else. Everyone wants armoured. I don't think I've ever given away something that I spent forty hours on before, that's new. But I was planning on it, so no surprises.

My car has outdone its ghettoeness. Before it was merely a piece of junk and an eyesore. The bumper was held on by duct-tape, the gas gauge read whatever you moved the arrow to, bits of plastic left and right were falling off and poking me in the legs. Now the radio is blown out by a jump situation and I have to disconnect the battery with a ten millimeter every time I turn the car off or else it slowly drains the battery.

I was commiserating with another Sephia owner and he related that almost all the same problems exist in his. The opposite window fell out of the track, the radio is blown out, most of the same bits of plastic are falling off/poking him in the leg and his bumper is held on by tape, but again on the opposite side.

“But it handles great in snow!”

Auf weidersehen,

-I