Mark A. Kilmer (the weblog)

On the morrow in the morning, I go to have a CT Scan performed on my neck and mouth. The BOT cancer which afflicted me last year is presumed gone, and we were told that this was a mandatory precaution, but I don’t know. I’ll never know that I am 100% without it. The recovery of late has seemed slow, as it has been since my last treatment in late November, and I still have weight to gain.

The doctors tell me nothing.

But it will soon be my nine-month anniversary, and I should know the scan results by then. (I’d like to think they’d tell me if the tumor has recurred, but one never knows. It always feels like there’s so much they never would tell me.)

If you’ve been diagnosed with cancer at the base of the tongue and have googled this, the treatment story is in the News from the World of Medicine category, along with some about the long recovery. This is not a walk in the park, and there are times you’d sooner be doing something else, living as you had before, but it can be cured and the cure will not kill you. You simply must go through the cure, and it will probably be aggressive if your tumor is staged like mine was (4, though the doctors were never were clear). Don’t think about why me, don’t wish that things could be different, just do it. And pray. Divine mercy is important. There will be plenty of time for instrospection later, if you’re into that sort of thing.

Say a prayer for me, while you’re at it. Tomorrow’s the scan — my 6 month scan at 9 months, as my 1 month scan was at 3. Whatever.

Over at NewsBusters.org, they have the vid. It’s NBC News’ Andrea Mitchell spilling the beans on Barry to Chris Matthews last night over on the Keefums Network (MSNBC):

MITCHELL: Let me just say something about the message management. He didn’t have reporters with him, he didn’t have a press pool, he didn’t do a press conference while he was on the ground in either Afghanistan or Iraq. What you’re seeing is not reporters brought in. You’re seeing selected pictures taken by the military, questions by the military, and what some would call fake interviews, because they’re not interviews from a journalist. So, there’s a real press issue here. Politically it’s smart as can be. But we’ve not seen a presidential candidate do this, in my recollection, ever before.

Matthews goes on to suggest that the Obama peeps might be picking the people in the military cheering lines, filling them with adulating African Americans.

MATTHEWS: Let me ask you about access to the troops, Andrea. A lot of African-American faces over there, very happy, delighted faces. Is that a representation of the percentage of service people who are African-American, or did they all choose to join someone they like, apparently? What’s the story?

MITCHELL: I can’t really say that. Being a reporter who was not present in any of those situations, I just cannot report on what was edited out, what was, you know, on the sidelines. That’s my issue. We don’t know what we are seeing.

Who is Obama’s media guy? Who chooses his interviews, his crowds, his venues, his backdrops?

Chances are, it’s the guy at the top. Some hard-left magazine reported in early 2007:

Which brings us to something else the two men [Obama and Massachusetts Governor Deval Patrick] share: David Axelrod, the 51-year-old reporter turned media consultant who was the key media strategist for both men’s campaigns. He’s the one who wrote those ads, framed that shot and came up with the “Yes We Can” tag line.

Yes we can… watch Axelrod, formerly of the Chicago Tribune, play with the media’s already amorous, aroused, and desiring tendencies towards the pseudo-messiah. And we can underscore it.

(more…)

I checked out the American Cancer Society’s SharingHope.tv web site, looking for a user-submitted vid which was upbeat. Yeah, you think cancer, you might not think “HAPPINESS AND SUNSHINE,” but I stumbled on a video from Annie Johnson of South Dakota, a 25-year-old gal who was told, evidently, that she’d be gone by last September.

She credits God and a doctor who really cared for her cancer slipping into remission. She’s beating this ugly affliction! WTG, Annie.

I know it has been only 6-Months since my treatment ended, but my Stage 4 BOT tumor is still gone. My recovery from treatment is continuing apace. So why am I not as upbeat as Annie? It has been cold and gray all day, that’s why! It’s June, fercryingoutloud, so what’s this 64° nonsense?

Sorry about that. Things could be worse, yep, and I respect all weather for its place in God’s atmosphere.

Anyway, check out Annie:

For Sunday, June 8, 2008

FOX News Sunday (FNS): Host Chris Wallace chats with potential veeps: Governors Tim Pawlenty (R-Minnesota) and Tim Kaine (D-Virginia).

This Week (ABC): Host George Stephanopoulos has Senators Lindsey Graham (R-South Carolina) and John Kerry (D-Massachusetts) on the air as surrogates to argue about the Presidential election, then Senator Dianne Feinstein will talk about the historic secret summit between Clinton (Hillary) and Obama.

Meet the Press (NBC): Host Tim Russert has a roundtable with a bunch of NBC News reporters: Ron Allen, Lee Cowan, David Gregory, Andrea Mitchell, Kelly O’Donnell, and Chuck Todd.

Face the Nation (CBS): Host Bob Schieffer has Hillary’s mouthpiece Howard Wolfson, then turns to Representative Chuck Rangel (D-New York) and Senator Jim Webb (D-Virginia).

Late Edition (CNN): Host Wolf Blitzer will interview Senators Jon Kyl (R-Arizona) and Bobby Casey (D-Pennsylvania), Kay Bailey Hutchison (R-Texas) and Feinstein, and his usual cast of thousands.

= = = = =

The Senate’s two “dumb guys” are on display this week in Jim Webb (FTN) and Junior Casey (LE), a sure contributor to the morning’s mirth. The surrogate thing is going on again.

DiFi’s not going to spill the beans on that irrelevant get-together between Barry and Hillary at her DC home, one which I mockingly call “historic” merely because it has caught the scorned media’s imagination.

And Russert continues his painful habit of interviewing official pundits and unofficial pundits (reporters). At least we’ll know what the Washington Press Corp thinks, but I do not understand how he talk to NBC News folks with including their two brightest stars: Chris Matthews and the sportscaster Keith Olbermann.

I’ll be by early tomorrow afternoon (ET) with a review of these shows, and I should be in a better mood by then.

The Six-Month Exam

This was the big one, they’d told me. Both Dr. Shocker and Dr. Howells had surrounded the six-month exam with aura of import, and I expected the skies to open and some Angel to tell me something which would bathe my ears in pure majesty.

Yes, I still have difficulty swallowing, though that gets better as time wears on. Slowly. The pain of the past is fine where it is: the past. The weight gain has been slow. Yeah, things were looking upward, though cancer be not an upwardly-mobile disease or doohickey, and I expected a decent report.

On a beautiful afternoon, my beautiful wife – who had a tooth pulled this morning – and I went in to the office in the medical center across Howard Avenue from the hospital. (Note: The church I attended as a youth, Fourth Evangelical Lutheran, is located a few blocks down on that selfsame Howard Avenue.)

There was a man leaning on the wall outside the entrance. He was a drifter, I could tell, who vaguely resembled Zach from All My Children with a moustache. I feared that we would be robbed violently, but we slipped past the drifter and made it in safely. The otolaryngologists, including Dr. Howells, share a waiting room with the audiologists, so I had my hearing aid’s tubing fixed while we saw Dr. Howells. The original otolaryngologist is no longer on the masthead, but the woman who fitted me for my hearing aid several years ago, and got a huge glob of molding foam stuck in my ear canal which had to be removed (painfully) by an otolaryngologist named Higgins, now runs the place. I approached her with quite a bit of trepidation, but she was pleasant enough. I stopped shaking in my New Balance sneakers, the ones which had been place on my feet when, unconscious, I was whisked to the hospital eight years ago for another sudden ailment.

Life’s been good to me so far. Yes, really.

We waited for a while in the silent, cool Room 8 after the nice girl led us back. Diane heard my wrist watch tick on my wrist until Jared Henry, the physician’s assistant, walked in to have the old look. To give me the once over twice. I had worn the same Yankees shirt I had on my torso when he told me last August that my pain might be caused by cancer, and he actually noticed what it said. I’ve worn the shirt – Yankee blue with scripted, white lettering – every time I’ve been there for an exam or for test results, and now he notices. And he tells me that he’s a Red Sox fan. Nervously, I wish Papi the best.

I told him about the swallowing. After a moment of other conversation, he asks me if I’m drinking lots of fluids. I did not tell him, “Gee, I never would have guessed that you’re a Sox fan.” Nope, I explained that I drink as much as I can, what with the trouble I have with swallowing liquids.

Jared has been wonderful throughout this. Unlike Manny, he does not take steroids.

*He examined my neck and he stuck a tongue depressor in my mouth and made me be Fonzie — “AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA!” – while he looked in with a mirror and a light. He said he saw nothing, but Dr. Howell’s would also take a look, maybe stick that tube up my nose. He left.

After a while, Jared Henry returned with Dr. Howells. Dr. Howells felt up my neck and did the same thing with the mirror and the light and the tongue depressor. He said that he saw nothing, but that I still have a good deal of mucous back there. I almost asked him if it could instead be a mucous-like substance, but I was happy not to have a tumor.

And no tube up my nose.

Two words not spoken during this exam: tumor and cancer.

I asked Howells about the swallowing, and he said that it might never be as it was, but it is too soon to say that this is how good it gets. He said that it is good to hear that it is still improving. He told me to keep eating: use it or lose it.

And that was it. There were no spectacular pronouncements, no one to cast the Urim and Thummim to let me know how this ends. Of if it ends.

We went to the grocery to buy some soft foods for my wife’s temporary diet, and I bought my first two packs of Topps baseball cards in a very long time. (They package the bubblegum almost separately these days.)

When we got home, I spun some grooves from trumpeter Kenny Dorham, realizing that one cannot spin an mp3 file. I see Dr. Shocker, the radiation oncologist, later this month, and he’ll set up the 6-month PET Scan. So far, so good.

When this began with the preliminary diagnosis late last August and I knew that I had cancer, I had HOPE that my condition would CHANGE. It was through this HOPE that my life CHANGED. I called it, “HOPECHANGEHOPECHANGEHOPE.”

Never mind. Thanks for reading.