Graduation

My older daughter graduates college one week from today. As most parents must feel, I can scarcely believe how the time has gone by. Very short synopsis: For the first 12 years we were best buddies. From 12 to 18 we could barely be in the same room without some sort of conflict. Things started improving when we began our road trips looking for colleges. The last two years have seen a return to our original closeness, more on an adult level, but she's still my baby and I'm still daddy.

The original plan for graduation was that I would fly out there with my younger daughter and my parents, attend graduation Saturday morning, and then we'd go for a celebratory lunch.

The mother would fly out separately, take the girls for dinner, and she and I would barely interact, maybe not even see each other. That's how things have been the last three years or so.

But this is my daughter's weekend. It is not about the mother and me but rather about this young woman we have helped form, for better or worse. It would be nice if she could have a cap & gown picture with both her parents, I think that would make her happy. So I've decided to invite the mother to join us for lunch. I don't know if she'll accept, but it will be good if we can put aside our bullsh*t for an afternoon.

One Delicious Week

I have a treatment every three weeks. So far I've had 2 with the next one slated for Wednesday. For about the first 2 weeks after a treatment I:
1) Have no energy. No concentration. I can go to the office for 4 or 5 hours, but then I have to come home and collapse. Everything's kind of a haze.
2) Nothing tastes good. Food & drink either has no taste or tastes bad.
3) I have no sex drive.
4) My sleep patterns are way off because of the naps so I'm up at 3am every night.
5) I generally feel like crap.

And then there's the 3rd week. All of a sudden it all comes back. I can work all day and then hang out at night. I can focus. The simplest dish tastes great, and yada yada yada, I'm ready to rock and roll. The contrast between the first 2 weeks and the third is so great that it's almost worth it to go through the crap stage just to get to that third week. I get home from work, go out for a long walk, take pictures, stop in a restaurant, have a drink, see friends and sleep through the night.

I think if I can figure out how to maintain that 3rd week intensity all the time after this stuff is over I will have attained satori.

Update: I had a follow-up PET scan on Tuesday. The way it works is like this: they shoot me up with some radioactive stuff, run me through a scanner for about an hour, and any criminal activity inside me lights up on the film. At the first PET scan, done before the first treatment, I lit up like a Christmas tree. That was expected. After Tuesday's scan, all the old lights were out. That was very good news. There was, however, one new light. In my chest. Not a bright light, but a light nonetheless. Doc will discuss this with the radiologist on Monday and I'll probably have to go for a CT scan next week to see just what this new light is and hopefully it is another active lymph node that will be knocked out in the remaining chemo sessions. Never a dull moment.

Dated Movies

I was flipping channels the other night and Bye Bye Birdie was on. I remember that movie from when I was a kid and I liked it a lot so I watched it. I enjoyed it still, but was very aware of how dated it seems. That got me wondering about dated movies.

Saturday Night Fever is dated. Miami Vice (the TV show) is dated. The Graduate and Joe are dated.

The Godfather, The Great Gatsby, The Caine Mutiny, and The African Queen don't seem dated.

These are all films that take place in a particular time, yet some are dated and some aren't.

Seems to me that movies most likely (though not always, of course) to seem dated are those which are made during the time they take place. But I can't put my finger on why this is. One friend suggested that movies filmed in their time that are topical will end up seeming dated later, and maybe he's right. I'll have to think about it some more.

Or maybe I just need to get out more.

Part 2 (con't)

So yesterday was treatment #2 and all in all it wasn't too bad. A new drug was introduced, Rituxan, and that meant I would be there 5 hours instead of 2. It's fairly standard to have an allergic reaction to the Rituxan, anything from no reaction at all to complete intolerance so I needed to have a nurse in the room with me, monitoring blood pressure and watching for any negative reaction. Luckily, my cousin, K, a cancer nurse at Sloan Kettering is off on Wednesdays and she volunteered to come with me, removing the necessity of having the infusion done in hospital.

I started out with a blast of Benadryl & Tylenol to try and head off any reaction, then moved on to a drip bag of CHOP.

Then we started the Rituxan.

They start off really slow and then increase the drip, watching for a reaction. After about 10 minutes, I started to feel an itch in the back of my throat and in my ear. She slowed down the drip. Then my eyes started watering a lot and I got hives. It was interesting to observe this happening to me and both doc and K were keeping a close eye on things. When I started to wheeze and my throat began to tighten, doc said that was enough (we had gotten thru about 1/4 of the first of 2 bags of Rituxan) and she removed that bag, gave me a major blast of Benadryl and some steroid, and went back to a CHOP bag for a while.

In about a half hour, the allergic symptons were gone and she decided to -- chemo speak-- "challenge" me again with the Rituxan. This drug is what is known as a monoclonal antibody (whatever that means) and apparently not all of it is made from human stuff. Some of it comes from rat or cat or dog or something else which I can't remember now. It's that stuff that the body reacts to.

Anyway, she re-hooked the bag, dripped me real slow and this time everything went fine. I went thru the 2 bags, then finished up the CHOP (including 2 fat syringes of Red Devil, the stuff that causes chrome dome, and by 2pm K and I were out of there.

About this time, my friend J came by, and, as he's known K for years, and I knew that shortly my taste buds would again be all screwed up and all the other side effects I now expected, we decided to head immediately out for a bottle of wine to celebrate my successful challenge of Rituxan. I could barely keep my eyes open, but we had a fun time.

Then K walked home, J drove me home and hung out till AM showed up (I have a great tag-team support system!), she and I had dinner and I finally passed out around 11:30.

When I spoke to doc this morning I mentioned that last time I conked out as soon as I got home but this time, although I was exhausted, I couldn't sleep. She explained that this was due to the steroid blast and was natural.

And now I'm up to date till Friday when I have to inject myself with the Neulasta, which brings my white bood cell count back up. Time for a nap

Part 2

It's about 5am. My next treatment is in about 4 1/2 hours and this will be a long one, 6 or 7 hours as another drug is being added.

After 3 weeks I've finally begun to regain my stamina, sense of taste and sex drive. Shortly to be wiped out again for another 2 weeks.

I've discussed all that's going on with the girls, and despite my insistence that all will be well they are concerned and upset and that makes me feel bad. They're both away at college, the older one graduating next month and I just couldn't show up hairless without prior explanation, so I've been sending them pictures and joking about them. They said I look like Lex Luthor, but I sent them a shot of me with sunglasses so they could see I'm more like Morpheus from The Matrix (except for the part about me being white!). Also, it's better that they hear the truth from me than some sort of uninformed spin from their mother, who sort of knows what's going on, but not really.

They're concerned that I'm alone with no one to look after me and that I have nothing to eat. Fact is I have a wonderful network of friends and family on call 24/7 and I'm only by myself when I want to be.

Anyway, time for a short nap before I have to leave. See you on the other side of today...