Living In The Head
I’ve found that the best way for me to maintain a modicum of a healthy state of mind is to dwell as much as I can in the present moment, not withstanding the stage 4 cancer diagnosis and the coronavirus siege. A.k.a. “living in the now” as opposed to “living in the head“.
If I’m not diligent at monitoring and detecting which time frame my thoughts are dwelling within, I’ll find myself spending too much time speculating about a fearful future or spending too much time regretting bad decisions that I’ve made in the past. When I’m living in the present moment, life feels “lighter”. I’m more able to appreciate the sights, sounds, smells, touches, and tastes that are right in front of me… right now. Everything is much more vivid and alive. There is pure joy in indulging the sensations that permeate my being!
My Katy Kahuna massage chair, cannabis edibles, and meditation practices (Balance and Headspace apps) are great tools. I employ them to nudge me me back into the present moment from my wild and scary mental transgressions into the (scary) future and (regretful) past.
The Double Whammy
Geeze, a lot has changed since my last blog post on March 20th. I’ve gotta tip my hat to the insidious new coronavirus scourge that has emerged out of nowhere and jumped into the ring to compete with the EOAM for ownership over my body and soul. This emperor+virus double whammy indicates that the fit has really hit the shan for me and millions of others with pre-existing conditions. Yikes!
I know I’ve probably been an asshole more than I’ve been a nice person during my lifetime, but I didn’t think “god” would be so enraged at me that she would summon the vile coronavirus to compete with the sinister emperor for the annihilation of my physical and (especially) mental well being.
Ok then, enough doom and gloom (for now). On the bright side, I had a CT scan and a brain MRI since my prior post. They both indicate that the emperor is still firmly shackled in place. There is no doubt he’s still an integral part of me, hoping that the newcomer virus doesn’t beat him to the punch. He’s patiently waiting for the time when my Opdivo immunotherapy infusions stop working so that he can shed his shackles and resume pursuing his goal of slowly ravaging my body into dust.
Inventory Check!
I just finished my 10th and last radiation treatment for the enlarged lymph node in my left pelvic area. I was hoping to get all the “burns” in before any positive Coronavirus results for my county were announced. But alas, there were 2 confirmed cases on Monday and that number has risen to 7 as of today.
Now that the radiation regimen is completed, I still have an Opdivo infusion coming up next Wednesday. After that, barring any major, unforeseen, personal medical events (like another freakin’ stroke), I can really hunker down to weather the impending Coronavirus maelstrom.
As you might have guessed, I fall into the high risk, immune-system-compromised, Coronavirus group. D’oh! If I DO get sick when the hospitals are overflowing, and the inevitable “triage” policy is instituted, the triage nurse is gonna walk right past me and I’ll smile and wave her/him by. At this point in my life, what more can happen to me? LOL!
On the bright side, I decided to take inventory on my beloved stress-and-anxiety-reducing cannabis product stash…
Between my stash and the frequent warm embraces of Katy Kahuna, I think I’m good to go for quite awhile, dontcha think?
Rejected And Reversed
I thought I had gotten away with transitioning between health insurers seamlessly. But alas, in this fucked up, maddeningly complicated, healthcare system, it was not meant to be.
This past Monday I started a 10 session radiation regimen for a growing cancerous lymph node in my left pelvic region. The previous week I had a standard “radiation teach” learning session and a “coordinate scanning” CT scan so that the technicians could use the images to guide Burnadette’s radiation beam to its nasty target.
Early in the week I received this notice of rejection from my new insurance company:
So, I went to the Excellus BCBS web site to verify. Lo and behold:
After calling my radiologist and telling her about the rejection, she told me not to worry. She would call the insurance company and have a peer-to-peer discussion with the insurance company doctor that rejected my claims.
On Friday, I received this reversal of decision notice:
My radiologist came through for me with flying colors. Thanks Tracy. You rock!
So, I made it through 5, 15 minute, burn sessions last week. I hope I can make it through the last five this week before my state gets put on COVFEFE-45 “lockdown“. Oh, and I have an Opdivo infusion scheduled for the following week. This is sooooo much fun that I can’t wait to find out what the future holds.
Katy Kahuna
Meet sweet Katy Kahuna…
I’m 61 years old and I discovered dear Katy precisely when I needed her. She is the best personal item I’ve ever purchased.
Katy is a powerful yet gentle, robust, electro-mechanical marvel to behold. She weighs 220 lbs to my (current 😉 ) 211 lbs. Her physical structure is comprised of a set of sturdy, rolling, throbbing balls on an L track that straddles my spine. She also has a plethora of air compression bags and heating pads that can give me a bone crushing or smoothly relaxing massage.
Katy is soooo good that I want to die in her arms in mid-massage while the “Yoga-Stretch” program is running. When the program ends we can then be carted off to the crematory together and stuffed in an urn after we’re pulverized into ashes!
I think Katy allowed me to briefly glimpse, feel, taste, hear, and smell what’s waiting for us all on the other side. I experienced this out-of-body epiphany while simultaneously:
- Laying snugly in Katy’s arms running the “Elite Lower Back” program,
- High on a pot brownie, and
- Listening to an Eckhart Tolle podcast.
It was an orgasmic, heavenly experience!
Just Ten More Hits
By using the word “hits” in the title, I don’t mean “hits” from a blunt. I mean “hits” from my friend Burnadette Radner. She’s been waiting patiently in the background to come to my aid whenever I need her firepower in my battle against the EOAM. She’s already helped me with ten, burn-baby-burn, hits on each of two other cancerous lymph nodes a year ago.
My latest chest/abdomen/pelvis CT scan showed that a pesky lymph node in my left pelvic area has grown to a size (2.8 cm) such that my oncologist/radiologist dynamic duo decided it must be radiated ten times to kill the bastid. The lymph node in question has been growing slowly on and off for quite a while and now it’s time to blast the bejesus out of that EOAM soldier. I start the treatment regimen this upcoming Monday and I’m ready to rock. Let’s do it!
The good news in this post is that the CT scan also revealed that all the other numerous cancerous tissue spots are still shackled by the lifesaving power of my Opdivo (Nivolumab) infusions. Thanks Bristol-Myers Squibb!
An interesting side topic is that I had to transition from one insurer (UnitedHealthcare) to another (Excellus BCBS) just two days ago on 3/1/20 because my COBRA coverage expired.
Excellus won’t be too happy with the effect of my first ten claims on their bottom line:
Aw shit! This new customer is a fuckin’ stage 4 cancer patient. We can’t wait until he croaks or until protection for pre-existing conditions is gutted via the supreme court striking down the whole ACA law on a technicality.
Thumbs Up
At some point last Sunday I noticed some pain in my right thumb. The pain was localized to a small area where the nail boundary interfaces with the skin. The pain worsened and expanded outward during the day but I didn’t think much of it since it wasn’t dominating my consciousness.
When I woke up on Monday the pain was still expanding and my hitchhiking thumb looked like this:
Even though there weren’t any obvious patches of pus in the area, I started mining for its oozy white presence by gently puncturing the skin in several places with a hydrogen peroxide dipped needle. It hurt so much that I postponed further testing until I could actually see pus pockets sometime in the future.
Even though the pain was getting worse and the coverage area was expanding, I thought the infection wasn’t that bad and it would self-heal without any external medical treatment. As you may know, BD00 isn’t a doctor but he thinks he is after observing and experiencing four years of various cancer treatments. 😂
So, the pain kept getting worse until it was a continuous throbbing menace that kept me up most of Monday night. I swear I could feel the thump-thump of my heartbeat in my thumb every time it throbbed with pain.
On Tuesday afternoon I heeded the advice from a friend’s doctor boyfriend and headed to a Wellcare urgent care center.
The doctor looked at it and gently pressed on it looking for any liquid discharge. She decided not to lance the injury and wrote scripts for 7 days worth of Keplex antibiotic capsules and an antibiotic ointment. I noticed the antibiotics working rather quickly. I slept through Tuesday night without too much pain and on Wednesday the pain was much less intense. It also didn’t feel like the infection was expanding any further.
On Thursday I had an appointment with my oncologist and I showed him my thumb. Even though I told him I was on the mend, he was concerned that the infection was perhaps too deep and it could start affecting the physical function of my thumb by eating through ligaments/cartilage. Thus, he setup an appointment with an orthopedic doctor for Friday morning.
Of course, I had noticed the functional deterioration in my thumb already because, among other extremely simple activities, I couldn’t wipe my ass at all with it because the pain was so intense that I had to use my opposite hand. Oops, TMI? (A nonfunctional thumb sounds like a good bit for a Larry David “Curb Your Enthusiasm” episode.)
After a visit to the orthopedic doctor and an X-ray of the thumb, he sent me on my way with instructions to stay the course with the pills and ointment and a periodic dip in a cup of peroxide.
Here’s the latest pic showing the infection drying up and withering away.
A Chronic Left Cerebellar Lacunar Infarct
Before reading any further, please recite the title of this post really fast three times in a row.
I had my quarterly brain MRI last week followed by a meeting with my neurosurgeon and his nurse. Since the overall finding in the report was “no significant interval change“, meaning virtually no change from my October 15th MRI, the meeting was short and sweet. Phew! Another three month reprieve from the EOAM!
However, when I read the report in detail over the weekend I noticed a peculiar line in it……
Since I never saw anything like it on any previous MRI, I called my neurosurgeon’s office and left a message asking if the peculiar line in the report was a mistake, or just an area so minor that there is nothing to worry about. Should I do or take something different and/or be on the lookout for symptoms that indicate the “infarct” is getting worse?
The nurse called me back later and essentially said that it’s par for the course for my condition and age. And you know what? I think she’s absolutely right. Compared to the elephants in the room, you know, those three “enhancing hemorrhagic masses“, a “chronic left cerebellar lacunar infarct” is a pipsqueak. They both sound pretty scary though, dontcha think?
Not My Cause
Having been diagnosed with terminal lung cancer close to four years ago, I did not know that Radon was the second leading cause of lung cancer. We had our house tested for Radon years ago. The levels were way below the danger threshold.
I can’t be 100% sure, but I’m confident that the cause of my lung cancer was… as you guessed it… the number one cause… drum roll… smoking.
My father died two years ago of complications from the flu at the age of 90. Incredulously, my dad didn’t die of lung cancer despite the fact that he was a smoking fiend for about 40+ years. Even more incredibly, it took my dad only one trip to a hypnotist to get him to stop!!!
My pop smoked unfiltered Lucky Strikes. He sucked on those coffin nails one right after another as if they were taped together. The house was always filled with smoke. His toes and finger nails were always yellow and his breath smelled like burnt tobacco. At one point, since we weren’t rich, my dad bought some big ass cans of Laredo-branded tobacco and a cigarette rolling machine to save money. He had me slaving away (without pay!) for days making cancer sticks for him to suck on.
All of this happened back in the 40s/50s/60s/70s when the tobacco industry and its lobbyists were effective for decades at cleverly covering up how devastating smoking was to the health of all sentient beings. It reminds me of how the opioid pill pushers and their bipartisan congressional enablers have pulled the wool over the public’s eyes during the past decade.
I was on campus at UConn at the time my dad quit smoking. I was in the process of making my aperiodic, obligatory call home to reassure my parents that I was studying hard and not drinking/drugging my ass off into flunk city (like some of my classmates). When my mom told me dad quit smoking via the one trip to the hypnotist I nearly sharted. I steadfastly refused to acknowledge it. I smugly said that dad would be smoking again before I came home on semester break. But he never smoked again for 25+ years. Fuckin’ A!
Because of the dirty, gross experience from my dad’s smoking, I swore early on in my life that I would never smoke, EVER. I made it all the way through high school without smoking even though it seemed like half of my classmates were puffing away. But alas, while on spring break in my sophomore year down in Fort Lauderdale FL, I fucked up bigly.
I was standing in Big Daddy’s dance club with a beer in one hand and many previously consumed beers in my stomach. My right arm was resting on one of those old, purely mechanical, clunker cigarette machines while I watched a bunch of drunken peers dancing to disco. In my inebriated, uninhibited state of mind I made the biggest mistake of my life and put a bunch of quarters in the machine. The nerd in this pic says it all….
I thought hey, no problem. I’ll stop injecting carcinogens into my lungs when drunken spring break ends in a few days. Yeah, right. From then on I was hooked on nicotine delivery systems for 30+ years:
- I smoked cigarettes for about 15 years (1-2 packs of Marlboros per day).
- I switched to “chaw” and skoal for about 5 years.
- I switched to nicotine gum for about 15 years.
I stopped all nicotine consumption approximately 3 years ago after being chemo-sick for three weeks straight. The illness overwhelmed my nicotine cravings. My taste buds were in a state where everything I put in my mouth tasted like copper shite except for bottles of Boost. I threw away all my boxes of ebay-bought Nicotrol gum and I’ve never looked back.
How Many Types Do You Have?
Here are all of my healthcare provider types:
- Oncologist
- Neurosurgeon
- Stroke neurologist
- Radiologist
- Pain management physician
- Psychiatric nurse
- Primary care physician
Please reference the bogus system diagram below while reading the next inane paragraph.
Being a C++ coder, I could design and code up a farcical class of attributes and behaviors for each healthcare provider type. I can then wire them together into a structured “cancer system” explicitly designed to protect the patient (ME!) from the EOAM. I can then write a simulator and run all kinds of hypothetical scenarios on the system. Who knows, with a set of tweaks to the static system structure and dynamic class behaviors, I’ll find a way to permanently silence the crab-man on one of my Monte Carlo simulation runs.
I remember the good ole days when I needed only one healthcare provider type – a primary care doctor. How many types do you require?
Why am I here?
WTF?
Meh!
D'oh!
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