Diary of a Network Geek

JuicemanJunior

Originally uploaded by Network Geek

I bought a juicer this weekend.

Specifically, I bought a Juiceman, Jr. It’s probably not the best one there is, but it was cheap, so I figured I didn’t have much to lose.
I’ve been meaning to buy a juicer for a long time. Back when I was just about done with my chemotherapy, I ran into a lot of cancer survivors and they all seemed to have juicers. I lost count of how many times I was asked if I had gotten a juicer yet. I’d meant to, but just never got around to it. Well, after this past week, I decided it was finally time to stop obsessing over getting the “right” one and just get the cheapest one for now. I figured once I had some clue what I was doing and how much I was going to actually use it, then I could decide on a better machine. In the mean time, though, I figured that something was better than nothing.

So, off I went this weekend to Target and I got myself the cheapest juicer they had. At $59.99, it was the Juiceman, Jr. Turns out, this was the machine endorsed by the “Juiceman” himself. That crazy, white-haired guy on the infomercials that started a lot of the most recent juicing craze. Turns out, he was a cancer survivor, too, and credits much of his health and recovery to juicing. Of course, I didn’t know all that when I first read about juicing or juicers. But, I know that I’ll ingest fewer calories with a higher nutritional content via fresh juice. And, since I’m sure I’m not getting my daily recommended servings of fruits and vegetables, I figured this might help with that, too.  All I need to do now is figure out how to “juice” bacon!

Seriously, the bottom line is that I need to improve my overall health and diet. I know dropping a few pounds will help in a lot of ways, but I need to be careful not to let my nutrition levels drop while I try to shed those pounds. Juicing seems like a good way to help make that happen.
We’ll see, I guess, but either way, it’s time I started making more positive changes in my life.

Advice from your Uncle Jim:
"No matter what goes wrong, there is always someone who knew it would."

OccludedView

Originally uploaded by Network Geek

Yeah, more scans.

Well, by the time most of you read this, I’ll be getting scanned at M. D. Anderson. Another CT scan, with barium contrast. And x-rays. I’m getting one every four months now, and then it’ll be every six and then once a year. Theoretically, it’ll be once a year forever, but I’m not sure if I can afford to do that forever, but I’m trying to take things one scan at a time. I try not to worry, but it does seem like I’m paying an endless series of medical bills and it does get to be a drain on my income.

Naturally, I worry about what the results will be. I won’t know until Tuesday next week, so I’ll just have to hold on and hope for the best.
The picture I’ve posted here includes that first x-ray from just under two years ago when I thought I had pneumonia. When my General Practitioner saw the film, well, I don’t think he’d ever told anyone they were going to die before. Oh, that’s not what he said, but that’s what his face said. The words he used were “unidentified mass”, but what I heard was cancer and death. As I recall, I started to cry in the exam room.

But, obviously, that’s not what happened.
I didn’t die. I went through chemo and came out a different person six months later. I’m not quite the same guy I was when I came down with a slight case of cancer. I’m not entirely sure how I am different, really, but I know I am. I can feel the difference.
This weekend, I was talking with someone about a book. It was a book that had been recommended. It had been offered as a guide to finding God, or at least an aid. My response was that I didn’t know much about spirituality, really, but I spent a lot of time reading books about it and I never once found God in a book. Books are about knowing things in my head, understanding, an intellectual knowledge. But, God and spirituality is something I need to feel. Those are things that knowing in my head hasn’t been of any real benefit to me. They’re things that I have to experience, to feel.

A friend of mine tells me that I’ve gained some spiritual knowledge from my ordeal. Some new, deeper truth about life, my life, that I have yet to integrate into my world. He seems to think that’s why I get uneasy and restless more often than used to. He’s more spiritual than I am, so maybe he’s right. I don’t know.
I do know that while I spend a lot of time talking at God, I don’t spend a lot of time listening. For all I know, God’s been answering me quite directly for some time now, but my mind is too filled with chatter and mental junk that I can’t hear Him. So, what to do. Well, I don’t know, really, but old habits die hard, so I’m reading a book on meditation. Specifically, A Practical Guide to Buddhist Meditation by Paramananda. My thought is that it will help me still my mind and clear the way for something better to come into me. When I used to meditate, back in college, it used to really relax me and calm me down. But, it’s been so long, I thought I could use a refresher course in how to do it. Besides, it was on sale. I can’t hardly resist a book sale.

Who knows? Maybe next time, I won’t get so worked up about getting the radioactive enema from a stranger.
Wouldn’t count on it, though.

Through a circuitous route, I stumbled across an article by Tony Snow, a speech writer and media consultant for President George H. W. Bush.

Mr. Snow died on July 12, 2008, after fighting cancer, twice. Before he passed away, however, he wrote this article for Christianity Today, titled Cancer’s Unexpected Blessings. Go, read the article, then, if you can stomach some more, come back and I’ll share with you some of my thoughts on slow-dancing with death for the better part of a year.

We humans spend a lot of time worrying about death. Perhaps not on an individual basis, but in the aggregate, we spend a lot of time trying to avoid death, to hide from it, to deny it. When I was diagnosed with cancer almost two years ago, I could no longer hide from it or feel myself into thinking that it was a long way off. It could be tomorrow, next week, months from now, or years, but I’m going to die. In fact, we all are, sooner or later. I’ve heard it said that death is the one thing we all have in common. None of use make it out of here alive.
So, what does that mean? On a practical level, what does it mean to know that I’m going to die? It means that every moment is borrowed time. Every experience, no matter how painful or uncomfortable, is an opportunity to learn something, about myself, about my world or about my God. Frankly, it’s hard to put into words. I think that only someone who’s been close to death really gets it deep down in the bones where words don’t quite reach. Because, you see, when I was there, when I was right close to taking my last breath, I was convinced that it wasn’t quite time yet. Only later, when I’d had a chance to think about it did I truly understand how close I’d come to being gone. When I was there, when the Angel of Death had me in that cold, bony bear-hug, it was the farthest thing from my mind. Then, all I could think about was living. All I could think about was seeing people I missed, doing things that I wanted to do. Maybe trying to correct a few of the mistakes I’d made along the way and, hopefully, God willing, have time enough to take another shot at some of those things and do ’em right this time around.
Naturally, when I was first diagnosed, I was quite upset. I felt cheated, like God owed me so many more years of life and taking that away from me was unfair. That, however, didn’t last nearly as long as I would have thought.

In another article on MSN, I read “Learning you have cancer and going through treatment can dramatically affect a person’s life. Cancer can be isolating, and depression affects up to 38 percent of cancer patients.” My thought when I read that was, “No shit”. Who can understand something like this? How can you explain it? A fellow cancer survivor, and a good friend of mine, talked about going to the doctor after getting diagnosed to “…see how badly my body had betrayed me.” And, that, as much as anything, sums up that weird feeling of loss and surprise and gut-checking impact when the diagnosis is made, then confirmed. It knocks you off your emotional feet, stalls your motivational momentum, and kicks you in your spiritual nut-sack. Suddenly, every uncomfortable moment becomes more precious than any commodity you’ve ever owned. You find yourself suddenly willing to trade any possession, no matter how precious, for a just a few more minutes in the embrace of an old friend, or the bed of an old lover. Some, like me, may find themselves longing to know the mind of God, but without the big rush to look Him in the eye to ask the questions.
It’s funny, when I think of it now, how many times I’ve contemplated killing myself over the years. Well, it’s funny in light of how many radioactive enemas I’ve had, and how much personal dignity I’ve traded, all in the effort to squeeze a few more minutes out of this drab, pre-processed world of ours. Not too many years before my diagnosis, I was at one of those points. It’d been a rough year, or two or three, and I thought I was done, finally. But, God had a few lessons left to teach me, a few things for me, perhaps, to teach someone else, so I’m still here, flailing about for words to express the unexpressible.

In the end, what cancer taught me was something I thought I’d learned from that old poet, Warren Zevon, several years before, when he was dying of cancer. It was a quote, from his last live TV appearance on the David Letterman Show that appeared on the VH1 retrospective, which I watched again while I wrote the last bit of this post. After long last, I finally understand just how much to enjoy every sandwich.

Advice from your Uncle Jim:
"The man who makes no mistakes does not usually make anything."
   --William Conner Magee

So, in a few minutes, I’m going to head down to M. D. Anderson Cancer Center to get the results of my scan from last week.

I wanted to post a picture of the outside of M. D. Anderson, but when I was taking them last week, a security guard came and hassled me. Normally, I’d have hassled back, especially since there were no signs or other posted warnings against photography. Also, I was outside taking pictures and avoiding shots of people. I mean, I was a cancer patient, after all, and I know how sensitive I was about pictures, so I wouldn’t want to stress anyone else out about it. In any case, I owe them some money and didn’t have the time to be arrested or anything like that, so I complied with the “nice officer’s requests”. I actually did try to get the “proper permission”, but no one with the right “authority” would reply to me. So, the long and short of it is, no pictures. Oh, well!

In any case, I’ll spend most of my morning waiting around to see my doctor, which is fine. I’m sure the results will be clear because, other than a little head cold and congestion, I feel fine. I’m not sure if I have a fever any more or not because as I was going to check my temperature last night after work, I dropped the thermometer. I wonder if the mercury will show up on blood work? So, I’ll probably stop on the way home and get a new, cheap digital thermometer. And, maybe, if I talk to my oncologist real sweet, she’ll write me a prescription for something that will help clear out this congestion and whatever else is holding on in my head and lungs. I suspect she will, not only because they’re good like that in the Lymphoma clinic, but also because I think it would look bad if I died from pneumonia after they saved me from cancer!

Oh, yeah, if anyone knows a good place in Houston to sell jewelry, let me know in the comments. I’ve got to come up with a little over $1500 fast to pay for a replacement fence. I’m sure I could borrow the money from several people, but I’d rather get rid of my old platinum wedding bands and some of the jewelry I bought for my ex-wife that she left behind and pay for it that way. I hate the idea of taking it to a pawn shop, because I’m sure they’ll screw me royally on the price. I may borrow the money and try eBay for the jewelry, too. Might be easier all the way around.

Anyway, I’ve got to run to the clinic now. I’ll definitely post an update later with results from the scan, good, bad or indifferent!

UPDATE: Didn’t feel like writing a whole new entry just to say I’m still cancer free.  *yawn*  And, the doctor did write a prescription for antibiotics, just in case.  And, I got chewed out a little bit for not getting to see an eye doctor like I was supposed to do.  But, all that aside, I’m still cancer free. (Yea!)

Yes, you read that right, The Five Worst Things About Surviving Cancer.

When Kat asked me to write a guest post for the Canard Collective, this was the first topic that jumped to mind. Well, actually, to be fully honest, my first thoughts were about how much easier it would be to write about the five best things about, well, almost anything. The five best things about being divorced, for instance, or being unemployed or… Well, you get the idea. But, then, being the contrarian that I am, I thought about this. You know, people always think when you survive a major illness, or, as I like to say, cheat death, that your troubles are over. But, gentle readers, I’m here to tell you that it is not so. Surviving is just the beginning of the problems.

So, go over to the Collective and read what I wrote.  Then laugh at how different it is from all the other stuff that people did guest posts about.

Advice from your Uncle Jim:
"The only difference between saints and sinners is that every saint has a past and every sinner has a future."
   --Oscar Wilde

Science-fiction has become science fact yet again.

I know why a lot of writers have stopped trying to write science fiction, at least the good, old, hard science kind of science fiction. We are on such a fast development cycle of science and technology that predicting the future is almost impossible.

Do you remember the classic book, Flowers for Algernon? The book is about a young man who is mentally retarded and, as a result, has a limited life. Then, a scientist makes him the human trial for a drug that corrects his lack and even goes beyond that to make him a genius. Well, it’s quite possible that will be a reality soon, at least for certain kinds of mental retardation. An article over at Scientific American has the details.

So, the future is now and the next time you see a story about advances in medical science, think about this book, and this cure.  What will we cure next?  Honestly, I’m not sure if I hope more that it’s cancer or the common cold.

Everything is still clear.

The doctor said my blood work was excellent.  I put on a couple of pounds, but, then it beats the way I took off all that weight last year!  My blood pressure was lower than it’s been on a Monday in a very long time, though, that’s probably because I wasn’t at work.  The scar tissue on my right lung is about as small as it’s likely to get though, and the doctor seemed fine with that.

Everything else, medically, satisfied the doctor, who seemed quite pleased with my progress.
The one thing I do still worry about is the money.  Even with what my medical insurance pays, I’m probably going to owe several thousand dollars this year and next year and, possibly, the year after that!  The thousand dollar deductible and 20% the insurance company doesn’t cover adds up pretty quickly with all these scans.  At least I’m on the right side of the grass to deal with them, though, so, I know things will work out eventually.
And, even though we’re paying big money at the pumps, I’m very grateful to be working in an industry that services the oil fields right now.  We have work for the next three to five years and they keep me busy.  That’s something else I’m really thankful for: having a job.  It’s not too many years ago I was out of work and didn’t know when I’d work again.  I try to remember that when I have problems on Mondays or have to work late on a Friday to update the firmware on the server drive array.

On a sad note, I found out this morning that an old friend whom I’d fallen out of touch with died yesterday from pancreatic cancer.  Even though I hadn’t really talked to him in years, knowing that he’s gone makes my own results a little bitter-sweet.
Cancer touches so many lives and I count myself as truly blessed to have been spared so many of the worst aspects of it.  In many ways, I’ve been very fortunate.  I do want you all to know that I’m more than willing to talk about cancer or my treatment with anyone who may be dealing with it elsewhere in their life.  I hope no one has been touched by cancer more than they have through me, but, if you all have, know that you don’t need to be alone with it.

Thanks again for all your prayers and positive support and thoughts!

Advice from your Uncle Jim:
"A hero is no braver than anyone else. A hero is only brave five minutes longer."
   --Anonymous

By the time most of you read this, I’ll be fully irradiated and probed with God-knows-what-kind of rays.

Yes, the joy of being a recovering cancer patient is that the doctors keep close watch on you.  Today, I’m having the second of four scans I’ll get this year.  This time, it’s a PET scan, not a CT scan.  Unlike a CT scan, I don’t have to drink the barium which messes up my digestive tract for days afterward.  Instead, I’ll have an I.V. put in and get injected with a kind of mildly radioactive glucose.  Then, I get to sit quietly and contemplate my sins for an hour while the glow-in-the-dark glucose gets sucked up by my body’s tissues.  Anything that’s more metabolically active than the surrounding tissue will get a higher dose and, therefore, show up more on the scan.  The theory is that a tumor would use more of that glucose and be an easily identifiable dark spot.

And, I have to admit, the geek in me loves to see the results of this.  When I was near the end of treatment, one of my doctors showed me a side-by-side comparison of the before and after PET scans.  It was like something from the Discovery channel.  Two ghostly, skeletal images of me, in basically the same position, rotating in unison on the screen.  One with a tumor the size of a football in my lung, the other with something more like a big lime, or a kiwi.  The difference was quite startling and the pictures themselves were fairly impressive.  Sometimes I wonder at the age of technological marvels in which we live.

In any case, I’ll be fully probed and, hopefully, done by lunch.  My plan is to take my keeper for the day to a decent sushi place for lunch, since I haven’t been able to eat since midnight, the only big downside to the PET scan.  And, for a change, I’ll get the results Monday, not a whole week later, too.  Normally, I have a very long wait to find out what, if anything, they may have discovered floating around in me, so this will be a nice change.
Naturally, I’ll report the results when I get them!

Well, according to the doctor, I’m still okay.

Actually, when I finally got the results of my PET scan, the results were better than “okay”. It seems that the scar tissue on my lung from the lymphoma has actually reduced and there’s active, visible healing going on there. So, I’m clean for another three months, when I’ll do this again.

I have to admit, I was a little worried, but, I guess that’s fairly normal. My doctor was actually quite pleased with the fact that I’d put on a little too much weight since I’d seen her last. She, and her entire staff of nurses, were positively giggly over my hair and how healthy I looked in general. I do feel good, but, I’m still very aware of how out of shape I am. And, I’m leary of every little cough or anything unusual,health-wise, at all. I hope that goes away, or at least reduces in intensity, eventually.

So, in short, to recap, or, to state again in a slightly different way, I’m good.
Oh, and before I forget, my mother finally found my blog, so everyone wave and say hello!