I should have been a pair of ragged claws

 In my draft folder for this blogging system is a post that blushingly explains how well chemotherapy is going for me and tries to recognize how fortunate I was to have few painful side-effects for an infamously painful treatment. Then came along four days where I was so tired I barely got out of bed. I thought - maybe I should rephrase that blog post, maybe I'm not that lucky. Then I woke up on Saturday morning, 3am, with my left arm screaming in pain. I swear I've broken it, but who breaks their arm in their sleep? At 8am Bessie drove me to the urgent treatment center for cancer patients at Johns Hopkins and we got my arm scanned and they spent most of the day trying to find for my arm a sling and a radiologist to give it a proper diagnosis. We left in the later afternoon with a sling, a bunch of prescriptions for pain meds, and little more than assurances that my arm was not completely broken. We found out on Monday that my cancer-filled upper left arm broke the bone and eru...

I start chemo in about 50 minutes. I ate a bowl of cereal over an hour ago, took my zofran to reduce my nausea, then I start on what looks like the most serious advent calendar I've ever seen that has strict instructions on how only the patient should handle the meds because, y'know, it's like legit poison and stuff. Hope you feel better! Thinking about how much my life has changed since early March is how most of you probably felt last March with the coronavirus pandemic and masks and social distancing and an unknown disease. I will say that I have a great envy for those who can now try to step back into normality, take off their masks, start travelling, and resume their lives after a pretty crappy year for a lot of people around the world. I feel like the eternal footman stepped in front of me as I was taking off my mask and said "I'm sorry, but this is not the way you're going. There is another path for you."  I don't intend to complain or moan on t...

 Had an MIBG scan yesterday to see if I would respond to a treatment called Azedra. The scan came back showing that I would likely respond to that treatment. (Need to have convo with docs to determine if we undergo that treatment, but more available treatments are good.) Also from the report, it says that the cancer was "largely unchanged since April 30th scan"! So, hey, that's good!

I think hope, like being a good person, is pretty dumb. Hope often leads to taking a sometimes questionable decision that leads to some greater future and ignoring all the bad things that will could happen along the way. Hope leads us to taking risks in our lives - telling people we love them, trying for a new job, having kids, starting something new. Following our hope invariably puts us in the way for pain, often some of the worst pain - unrequited love, infants preventing you from sleeping can be a hell scape, your dream job turns into a prison. But without hope, what good can happen in our lives? We need it as humans to live and breathe and grow and make and do things we never thought possible. As stupid as it is, having hope and acting on it is probably the best things about humans, even if it is kinda dumb. I finished the last zap of radiation of my current treatment today and right now I'm feeling better than I have since I woke up with my sore shoulder in December. I'm ...

It’s been a tough few weeks. I think the leg surgery has been a huge success - I’m scooting around the house easily, sometimes taking the stairs two at a time as I did before the surgery, and only feel pangs of pain in my femur from time to time. I’m able to go on walks outside that are about a mile long before my leg starts feeling weird. My surgical scars are healing and I’m working to recover some flexibility that will allow me to resume putting on my right sock and sitting cross-legged on the floor, but those complaints are small potatoes to how tough it was the night after the surgery when they had me on barely any painkillers. What completely knocked me on my butt recently is that they changed my diagnosis from pancreatic neuroendocrine tumor (PNET) to metastatic paraganglioma with a MAX gene mutation. Both are mouthfuls to say, but metastatic paraganglioma is a much rarer cancer than PNET. 2 out of a million people are diagnosed with paraganglioma and only 1% of those people h...

To my Hereford high school students who may have wondered why I suddenly disappeared: I was offered a long-term substitute job at Institute of Notre Dame, a Catholic girls school in Baltimore teaching engineering and physics. I'm starting on Monday(?!) going through June, so it's unlikely that I'll be subbing for Hereford anytime for the rest of this school year. To blame for me leaving Hereford are all the students that were in my classes when I was filling in for Ms. Watkins. (Ok, well, most of my students. . . glowers at TJ ) I loved teaching you all and it was the happiest time of my professional career. You are a fantastic lot; hilarious, eager to learn, polite, fun, and basically wonderful. I loved being a part of your lives, seeing you grow day to day, and trying to teach you and get you excited about stuff. Yet as much as I love seeing you all, being a substitute for a day is a bit of a drag, even at a great school like Hereford. You know how substitute days ...

Where to start? Brave New World , the next expansion for Civilization 5 , has been wrapped up and is ready to go. I've was able to fulfill a development dream and design a trade system to be added to the game. Something about caravans and trade ships moving around the screen delights me to no end and I hope other people enjoy it as well. After much discussion with Bessie, I've decided this would be the best time to leave my position at Firaxis Games and work with Todd and Derek at Gopherwood Studios . My seven years (!) at Firaxis have been wonderful and I'm proud that I got to work with such great people on such great products. I will miss my team tremendously; they are my second family and, while I'm not moving away from Baltimore, I'll miss talking to them daily and being a part of their lives. That said, I'm both nervous and excited about working at Gopherwood Studios. I'll be a contractor, largely responsible for pulling in my own clients, a...