Mark A. Kilmer (the weblog)

Monday, October 29, 2007

Well, this weekend was not what I had in mind. I started to notice life becoming a series of pains on Thursday morning, a terrible pain when I’d try to swallow food or water. (I’d love, just for one evening, to be able to drink through a few bottles of water rapidly. That, my friends, is my dream.) The cough drops don’t do anything anymore.

Saturday was my toughest day yet, though I did manage to go to the grocery store with my wife. There were no problems with that, though I wished I could have a few sips of water. I also bought a case of spring water bottles, as I am beginning to run low on them. They’re here, just in case.

Actually, Sunday was my toughest day yet. I had to take the medication at 7:30a – just two teaspoons of the thick, syrupy stuff – to be able to do the Sunday Show review for RedState.com, the most important conservative weblog (blog) on the internet. (I’m not tooting my horn, which is probably burnt to a crisp like the back of my tongue, as its importance derives not from me.) While writing, I found myself starting to doze off at the keyboard, something I attribute to the treatment, the lack of sleep the previous night, and the lack of water. (I still do get some water, and I treasure every sip I can drink. Especially the ones which go down the proper pipe.)

The medication, which was more than effective after my September 5 biopsy, isn’t quite doing its job, but I’ve been eating fairly normal meals, albeit with some pain. Diane made me soft carrots, shredded beef tips, and mashed potatoes for dinner on Sunday. And sips of water helped to keep my throat loosened. The pain also can be pushed aside.

And looking at what I learned last week, it seems not entirely so bad. Last Monday, I learned that week 6 of 8 in my treatment schedule begins on Wednesday. Last Wednesday, if I recall, I learned that they would finally begin treating the lymph nodes in the back of my neck, as a precaution, beginning today. That has happened. I can only guess that they go back to treating my throat next Monday, but I learned on Thursday that I no longer have that menacing tumor in my throat.

Along came Monday, and Diane and I went in to the Center for Cancer Care, arriving at 8:30 for an 8:30 treatment, the time having been moved back fifteen minutes because they had to use a new room. It was not the new room which I had been told would be used; that door was shut and the sign outside indicated that the room was designed for Brachytherapy, which is not what I was to receive (as far as I know). Brachytherapy involves putting the radiation source in a bizarre place near the tumor and letting forth with intense radiation, and my tumor isn’t here, Mrs. Torrence. (That’s lifted from the 1980 film, The Shining. I just had to watch some TV giggly girl on CBS list it as one of her favorite Halloween movies, and she knew nothing of how it was reviewed when it was first released, though she acted as if she did. She had not been either born or dropped off by the UFO.)

Anyway, I was led into Accelerator Room Two, which is similar to Accelerator Room One except that it was a larger radiation machine and its door is located on the opposite wall to the first accelerator Room.

The bald tech said, “You do know that you’re changing you treatment this week.” I said, yeah, they want to nuke some lymph nodes while protecting my spinal column. He grunted, something like that.

They also had to take some “pictures.” I took off my shirt and lay on the bench with my head in the small, plastic head-holder, just like in the other room.

They put in the mouthpiece and clamped on the mask as always. Trapped, I was forced to inhale the acrid breath of one of the techs as he scribbled on my mask. And my right eyebrow began to itch. And the two of them kept mumbling numbers, either to themselves or to each other: “110, 118, 112, 110.” I felt scribbling on the mask, smelled the marker, so it is probable or at least possible that they were writing these arbitrary numbers onto the mask. Which is what Sheri the radiation babe had done in the third radiation room last.

They took their “pictures,” then they placed a piece of wood next to each shoulder, I assume to block this special electron radiation from melting my spinal cord into one of the nastier forms of slag.

Then, after about half an hour – much longer than usual – I was done and given the promise that it would be much quicker tomorrow. I returned to my wife in the waiting room to wait – what else? – for the doctor. Shocker is out this week, but the emeritus Dr. Clement was there in his stead. Clement brought his own nurse, who might also have been dragged out of retirement.

My weight was down several pounds from my none-too-stocky frame, which I explained was due to the throat pain. She asked if I had a feeding tube and suggested that I get one.

Dr. Clement came in next. He also mentioned a feeding tube. And he told me that Hydrocodone makes one irregular and I should take and over-the-counter stool softener. I asked him to prescribe something which worked better than this Hydrocodone, thinking of some brutal narcotic painkiller, but he brushed me off. Instead, he wrote another prescription for the Hydrocodone and this stuff which will numb the back of my tongue for ten minutes so that I can eat, Lidocaine.

Dr. Clement looked down my throat – “It’s a mess down there.” – and detected a yeast infection. Diane tried to dissuade him from this diagnosis, telling him that Dr. Howells had not detected yeast but rather standard tissue after being blasted with radiation. Dr. Clement told her: “I’ve only been doing this for 35 years.” He prescribed a liquid from of Fluconazole, the medicine which had taken care of an infection and made it much easier to swallow several weeks ago.

For this reason, I hope that Clement was correct in his diagnosis. Of course, this would mean that Howells was wrong, and he’s the guy who told me that my tumor was gone. We’ll let the irony stop there, as I’d sooner not think about it.

But Clement asked me if I smoked. If it didn’t hurt a little when I tried to talk, I might have joked about medical marijuana, man, and you can run cars off hemp, dude, legalize, but I didn’t. I have not smoked a cigarette in almost exactly seven years, and I haven’t wanted one for about 6 ½. At first, it was because it was just a nasty habit all around; now, I note that it probably helped to make my body declare war against me.

That battle, it seems, is all but over. I’m just anxious to wrap up the treatment and begin to heal.

Sunday, October 28, 2007

On MTP, Tim Russert asked Chris Dodd if our soldiers had died for anything in Iraq. Dodd hemmed and hawed, mumbling something about “making space.” Russert played a clip of Dodd telling an audience that this war was “about oil.” Dodd still did not say that he thought our soldiers had died for oil.

On TW, John McCain said that taking public funds won’t hurt him between February of next year and the conventions because there will be more active party involvement at the various levels than Bob Dole had in ‘96: “I think we’ll have enough money to be competitive.”

On FNS, First Lady Laura Bush would not say directly that being first lady does not necessarily qualify someone to be President, but she is hot conflicted by Hillary’s candidacy and will vote for the Republican.

On FNS, Louisiana’s Governor-elect, Bobby Jindal, pledged to get all the federal funds committed to helping New Orleans, post-Katrina. Though he is a fiscal conservative, he said, he thinks the federal government should have to give away the money when they’ve promised.

Turning our attention to FTN, Crazy Carl Levin criticized the President for claiming that we must prevent Iran from obtaining the knowledge required to build a nuclear weapon. He said that it was alright for them to have that knowledge; we have to prevent them from using it.

Levin and Lindsey Graham agreed that waterboarding is torture, case closed, and Mike Mukasey is not qualified to be attorney general if he doesn’t toe that rhetorical line. (McCain had made a similar statement on TW.)

On LE, the UN’s IAEA boss Mohamed El Baradei said that Israel should not have bombed the facility in Syria without first coming to him; the IAEA, he said, is the world’s eyes and ears. He said that he has seen no proof that the Norks were assisting Syria in building a nuclear facility. (Remember, if he doesn’t personally see proof of something, it either does not exist or did not occur.)

Also on LE, Babs Boxer shrieked that the President should be nicer to Iran because at the rate he’s going, he is liable to tick them off. She specified that she is frightened, on behalf of the United States, of both Iranians and jihadists. (I assume this means that she lives in a constant state of terror regarding Iranian jihadists.) Trent Lott pointed out that the most heated rhetoric was coming from the Iranian leadership.

Read the show-by-show review at RedState.com.

For Sunday, October 28, 2007

Meet the Press (NBC): Tim Russert interviews Chris Dodd, perhaps to find some relevance to the man.

FOX News Sunday (FNS): Host Chris Wallace interviews first lady Laura Bush and Louisiana’s Governor-elect Bobby Jindal.

This Week (ABC): Host George Stephanopoulos talks to John McCain about campaign finance reform and then to Duncan Hunter & Diane Feinstein about the California wildfires.

Face the Nation (CBS): Host Bob Schieffer interviews Crazy Carl Levin and the ever-dependable Lindsey Graham.

Late Edition (CNN): Host Wolf Blitzer will host the return of the IAEA’s clueless Mohamed ElBaradei about Iranian nukes. He’ll then have Babs Boxer and Trent Lott by to discuss stuff, and he’ll then turn to Mike Huckabee.
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Who wants to be President? Dodd, Hunter, McCain, and Huckabee are running. I’m not sure what one can take from a (relatively) long sit-down with Dodd other than that the man wants to be President and that he will never be President. In fact, none of these men will every be President, and it’s too bad the sundry producers did not line up appearances from Senator Biden-mentum.

Perhaps the “new” John McCain will, for political reasons, pledge to lead a push to rescind the more onerous sections of the BCRA. Perhaps pigs will liftoff from Cape Canaveral and assume a low Earth-orbit. Hey, one never knows.

Jindal, as always, is a breath of reality. Nothing is to be gained or gleaned from such as Boxer and Levin, with emphasis on the lack of merit of the former. Perhaps Boxer has established “internet proof” that her State’s wildfires were set deliberately by Halliburton-Blackwater, as directed by the Tri Lats and the Bilderbergers.

The bottom line has been the side-effects of the radiation. When I awoke this AM, they were awful, my throat felt burnt inside and tight. I did manage a few gulps of water, though, and after sucking about half a lozenge, a bowl of Honey Nut Cheerios. The other half of the lozenge? I had put it on a piece of paper on the table, but the black cat opted to lie on it. I separated it from him, of course, and Roscoe didn’t seem to care. (He’s named for Roscoe “Fatty” Arbuckle, the silent-era comedy actor and director, though the cat is not fat, does not wear a hat, but behaves like a gnat. Imagine that. Roscoe does, however, have issues.)

The setback is for the cancer, though, and not for me.

We went to the cancer care center thinking none the different. They, meaning “the man” or “the machine,” would zap me then I’d go see Dr. Howells, the ENT guy who had diagnosed me.

They were a little late calling me back for the radiation treatment, but that was an in-and-out prospect. I had my blood taken yesterday, so we went straight to Dr. Howells’s office, across Howard Avenue from the hospital, in a set of buildings put there for doctors’ offices. And we waited only a few minutes, with CNN playing its closed-captions on the TV on the wall. Diane noted that Kiran Chetry, the CNN gal, was a “traitor.” I reminded her that Kiran had been shown the door at FNC, which I don’t know to be the case but it sounded good.

We were taken back to an examination room, and Dr. Howells came in after a while. He asked how I was doing, and I told him. And that I suspected the Yeast had returned to my throat. He slowly examined my throat with his fingers, the tumor and the lymph nodes: “That appears to be shrinking nicely.” This sounded great to me. Yeah, I had prayed that it be taken away, but this was nothing at which to laugh, let alone curse. There is always the bit about: “May thy will, not mine, be done.” That in itself makes me happy.

Dr. Howells said that because my throat was swelling, had been damaged by the radiation, he had to put a laryngoscope (or some similar thing) into my nose to look down my throat. He said that he doubted that it looked much different, what with the effects of the radiation, but he wanted to do this “just this one time. We probably won’t need it next time.”

He sprayed some monocaine into my right nostril, though I am very aware that monocaine exists only in fiction, but that’s what it sounded like to me. He left the room while it took effect, returning several minutes later to gently put a soft tube up my nose. Not far. He asked to be certain it didn’t hurt, but it more tickled than anything else. I was about to hear the first word on my tumor since it had been diagnosed almost a month ago.

Again, I’ve been concerned about the side-effects, both of the radiation and of the chemo; the cancer itself, no one told me even when I asked. What Dr. Howell’s finally did tell me actually floored me. Smiling broadly, he said that he saw no sign of the tumor or any residual cancer. As much as I am bothered by the side-effects, as awful as all this is, it is nothing beside that damned tumor. And the damned tumor is gone.

I expected that result so soon more than I foresaw the initial diagnosis, as I have prayed and have had many great folks praying for me and I wasn’t thinking of cancer at all when it was noticed. It caught me by surprise, though, to go from hoping and praying that the tumor would be gone by the time my treatment ended to know that it was gone and everything now was for certainty.

That being said, Dr. Lieb’s office called in the afternoon and demanded that I get my backside down there and see him pronto. He was leaving town or going deer hunting, or some such. (Lieb is the medical oncologist (chemo) who told us a few days before therapy began that this would be the most painful experience I’d ever have, that I would be writhing on a surface with no control of my functions, and that I had probably better pick out a casket now.

This afternoon, he was more reasonable. I’m doing very well, but he took that I carried a spring water bottle as a sign that I could no longer produce saliva, the thought of which he enjoyed. Unfortunately, that’s not the case. I carry it because I want to continue to swallow and because my mouth sometimes gets dry.

Anyway, he showed me my weekly platelet count, and it has dropped way down. Because my chemo is designed to sensitive my neck to the radiation, not to fight the (now missing) cancer, he was going to “hold” me this time. My fears that he would put me in the hospital overnight were short lived, as he meant only that I had to take tomorrow off chemotherapy.

He did not that the chemo was doing it’s job, as my neck was red. That’s come to be only this week, really, and I have the stuff – Radia Gel – I got on Monday.

Well, we’ll see how the rest of this goes.

As always, I need thoughts and I need prayers. These next 3 ½ weeks of treatment will be rough, and then I have weeks thereafter until I am healed from the treatment. I hope I’m eating solid food by Christmas.

Speaking of drugs, I am supposed to take something called Hydrocodone APAP, an elixir which features the narcotic Hydrocodone and the pain-killer acetaminophen. ButI haven’t. I’ve been imbibing, instead, what was left at the bottom of the bottle, and no one knows just what that is. It was somewhat nasty until I figured out what was going down, after my wife admonished me to be sure to shake the bottle as I don’t know what would be on the bottom if it weren’t mixed. There was nothing, really, to shake and mix at that point, but I’ve got a new bottle and things are okay on that end.

Last night was a rough night, for my sore throat anyway, and it was a little warm in the bedroom. I didn’t sleep, per se, well, and neither did Diane; but we were duly awake, but not as we know it, at the proper time. I had oatmeal for breakfast with no problem, and we made our way down to the treatment center.

The treatment in Accelerator Room 1 was quick enough, but then they took me to the other accelerator room (2?), where they readied it and me for next week’s treatments. These are the ones where they blast the lymph nodes in the back of my neck, something they couldn’t do with the first machine. They had to prepare blocks to protect my spinal cord. Yeah, it sounds insane, but nothing is really right about any of this. Things happen.

In a daze, I met my wife in the waiting room and we went over to the chemo section so they could take blood, which happened quickly and easily enough.

I’ve been gulping water, hydrated myself, pretty well of late, and this is a good thing. I’m eating fine so long as I have the right stuff to eat. For instanced, my wife made fettuccini alfredo for dinner last night, and with the afredo sauce, it went down fine and filled my stomach. I’m doing my fifth week of treatment, out of eight, and I’m still with it.

My neck and shoulders feel as if sunburned, I noted when I was drying off after my shower this AM. I’ve started using that Radia Gel cream nurse Theresa gave me on Monday, and it helps. All said, I’m doing a lot better than I feared I would be. We see Dr. Howell’s tomorrow, hopefully to learn something about the tumor. I’m in good spirits about this thing.