Bulldozer00's Blog

Since this blog is all about me, me, me, here’s what happened this week… to ME.

• I had a 2 hour MRI of the thoracic and cervical regions of my back on Tuesday.
• I finally ditched the Cardio Event Monitor (CEM) today after wearing it virtually 24 X 7 for a whole month.

The purpose of the MRI is to determine if something in/on my spine is contributing (along with one of my brain tumors) to the increasing numbness creeping up my whole right leg. The purpose of wearing the CEM is to determine if I have occasional Afib events, one of which that might have knocked a piece of plaque loose from somewhere and caused my small stroke back in July.

Since I’m not claustrophobic, I have no problem getting MRIs. However, about 1 hour and 45 minutes into this one my lower back started to ache because of the extreme flatness of the table. I was dying to move just a little bit to ease the ache but I didn’t want to blur the images. So, I counted sheep for a little while and then I switched to the classic meditation practice of counting breaths to distract my mind from the pain. I made it through without moving. Phew!

The first thing I did when I woke up this morning was rip the CEM electrodes off my torso and pack the equipment up for shipping back to the supplier. Whoo hoo! While wearing the CEM, my favorite line to people was “Watch out, I’m rigged to blow!“. Obviously, I intended it as a low key joke and I made sure I didn’t say it while I was at a store or where there was a large gathering of people. And you didn’t think I was that smart, right? Well, I’m not, but every once in awhile the universe infuses me with a fleeting glimpse of what it would be like to be a stable genius.

The last thing I’d like to share is that by the end of next week I’ll be fully weaned off steroids again for the umpteenth time. I’ll be able to stop (as a dear friend would say) “eating like an asshole” and drop the 8 lbs I piled on over the last month.

Every time I go on/off the ‘roids I have to switch between my fat-me and normal-me wardrobes. Or, more accurately, my fat-me and my less-fat-me wardrobes. Everyone maintains 2 wardrobes like that for those diet-on and diet-off days, right?

Oooh, oooh, oooh! And just one more last thing. I wrote this post a little “high“. My feet started to “heat” up a little while ago so I rubbed in some “Australian Dream” cream and squirted a little c-tincture beneath my tongue. It felt like it took forever to write the post and I made a bazillion typos, and I had to “iterate” on it about 2 bazillion times before I pushed the publish button. Please report typos so I can fix them.

The graph below attempts to capture BD00’s understanding of the time-varying nature of a person’s level of well being after being diagnosed with terminal cancer.

Pre-diagnosis, life is good. Mental and physical states are at a person-specific, baseline level of health. Then comes the big chill: “You have inoperable stage 4 cancer“. D’oh!

Sometime after the cheerful diagnosis, one’s physical health starts deteriorating and then one’s mental health hitches a ride on the luge of death careening down the mountain.

Of course, this is not “an everyone” curve. It’s a coarse model of what I think has been happening to me. I’ve been riding the luge for 3 years because either the mountain I’m on is pretty flat, or the brake is halfway stuck on, or both.

Our next profile is a very sad one, “The Breakdown Profile“. As soon as the terminal diagnosis is absorbed, the anxiety, fear, and depression quickly sets in, precluding the decline in physical health. This one hits home for me because I’ve experienced several cavernous depressions over the years way before the cancer diagnosis.

And then we have Nirvana, “The Buddha Profile“…..