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chroniclesofawkwardness · 5 years ago

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Me and OBG(YN)

My left ear has been popping a lot for the past few days. I don’t know if I somehow got water in my ear canal, have an infection, or it’s just the Ghost of Q-Tips Past taunting me. Googling “water in ear” led me to a suggestion for removing it called the suction cup method. I was supposed to tilt my head to one side, rub my hand up and down over my ear, then pull it away quickly. Ideally, the resulting vacuum would give the water a chance to escape. It didn’t.

I tried another way: tilting my ear to one side and pulling down on my earlobe, hoping that straightening my ear canal would give whatever I felt in there a chance to evacuate. It didn’t. I swore I could feel something working its way to the fringe of my inner ear, yet retreating only millimeters from freedom.

After three or four attempts apiece at creating suction cups and reenacting the classic labyrinth marble tilt game (substituting my ears for the maze and whatever was in my ear for the marble), I decided to wait before cooking up a hairbrained home remedy and doing real damage to myself, if I hadn’t already.

The popping and/or sloshing sound isn’t as pronounced today as it’s been over the past 48 hours. I hope it silences itself; I believe it will as long as I don’t try to touch my brain by passing my index finger through my ear. Whatever happens, the experience has allowed me to reflect on the last time I got something stuck in a bodily canal.

For years, I didn’t think twice about using Q-Tips to clean my ears. It was something I’d always done. I’d heard the tips could break off, but I thought this always happened to somebody else, until that is, the day it happened to me.

I met Dr. Petar Drača while I was leading the English conversation club at the American corner in Novi Sad. He was a gynecologist, his wife an anesthesiologist. I’d imagine they were in their late sixties or early seventies at the time. During dinner at their apartment one evening, they shared stories about their daughter, and their time Houston, Texas. Dr. Drača even got me a pair of ridiculously tight-fitting jeans with all sorts of designs on them when he saw I was struggling to find a decent pair of pants. Those jeans weren’t something I would have normally worn, but I was glad someone cared enough to do something like that for me when I was thousands of miles from home. Dr. Drača and his wife reminded me of my grandparents, who I missed terribly.

Dr. Drača’s office was across the street from the American Corner, and up the street from the apartment I shared with Dragana. I continued leading the conversation club after I moved out of that apartment and into the one I’d later share with Zs., so I still got to see Dr. Drača’s office sign every Wednesday.

I always thought I’d make it through life without requiring the services of a gynecologist like Dr. Drača. I hadn’t had any close calls since fifth grade, when Mrs. Layne had to remind me that I didn’t have ovaries after I freaked out about the possibility of ovarian cancer when it came up in health class or sex ed. Backed by Mrs. Layne’s anatomical assurance, I believed visiting a gynecologist was one less thing I’d have to worry about. I had no way of knowing how wrong I’d be, just as I’d been about my orange blood. If old habits die hard, old convictions die slowly.

As my relationship with Zs. deteriorated, so did my hygiene habits. Still, something I could not stand was a buildup of earwax. Removing it with a Q-Tip was one personal care routine I didn’t overlook. it required minimal effort, so it was perfect for someone in a weakened state of mind at the time, like me.

On probably a Tuesday, Zs.’s longest day at the university, I repeated the ritual of cleaning out my ears with a Q-Tip, as I had done thousands of times before without incident. Everything was fine until I heard the snap.

The tip of the Q-Tip I was using had broken off inside my ear; just like I’d been warned about hundreds of times.

Yet my first thought was not of my well-being:

Shit! If Zs. sees me like this, she’ll NEVER let me hear the end of it. She already hates me; the last thing I need to give her ammunition that comes from me having done something legitimately stupid.

I knew I wouldn’t see Zs. for several hours, so I had time to think, but the paralysis of fear didn’t take long to kick in. had no idea how to go about getting the tip of the Q-Tip out of my ear. I didn’t have the tenderest of hands, so trying to remove it myself was out of the question. I had to think about not only how to explain my problem in Serbian, but also how to find someone who would help me no questions asked. I didn’t have health insurance at the time; there’d been no reason to. Being insured by an American carrier while overseas was cost-prohibitive, and health insurance wasn’t a requirement for foreigners in Serbia back then. I’d never been sick or damaged enough to need it.

Until that moment.

The only doctor I knew I could trust was the same doctor who, due to his specialization, I could also assume would have tender hands. I decided I had to go see Dr. Drača the gynecologist and hope his wife, the anesthesiologist, could knock me out for three days after the removal, to spare me the wrath of Zs.

I found Dr. Drača‘s business card and called his number. Using a mixture of Serbian and English, I managed to explain what happened. He said I could stop by his office. Fortunately, I didn’t have to sit in stirrups; unfortunately, Dr. Drača didn’t have an appropriate instrument to remove the tip of the Q-Tip from my ear. He told me I’d need to see an Ear, Nose and Throat doctor (ENT). There was one in the office right next door, but as luck would have it, the doctor wasn’t in. I’d have to face the wrath of Zs. after all, and make an awkward trip to the Clinical Center of Vojvodina in the morning.

Zs. spent the night turned away from me as we slept, ridiculing me under her breath.

Dr. Drača had said the ENT could see me at 10:30 AM the next morning. A taxi could only take me so far due to restrictions on the types of vehicles allowed on the grounds. Dr. Drača had also told me exactly where I needed to go, but I’ve never been very good with directions. This left Q-Tip and me walking around in a state of confusion after I got out of the cab.

For the next hour, I meandered through two or three buildings, saw my fair share of ambulances and gurneys, and started to wonder if I’d ever get the damn thing out of my ear. I didn’t ask for directions because I assumed most of the doctors and nurses I saw would be too wrapped up in their own worlds to help me. By the time I finally found the right place, I was so late that I was afraid the ENT wouldn’t be able to see me.

I remembered something Zs.’s mother had once said when she came to visit after taking a notoriously behind schedule train from Subotica:

If you’re afraid of the end of the world, come to Serbia. It’ll get here a hundred years late.

One part of me said that I didn’t have anything to worry about because Zs.’s mother was right. If the end of the world was going to take its time descending upon Serbia, why should I rush to see a doctor I’d never met, only for him to do something that will take all of a minute? I’d probably never see him again. What happened to me will become nothing more than a punchline at his next cocktail party, if that.

As much as I had adapted to the more deliberate pace of life on the Balkans, the part of me that stil prized punctuality was panicking: “What happens if I can’t see the doctor? How long am I going to have to walk around with this thing in my ear? Zs. is going to love this.” Like I said, if old habits die hard, old convictions die slowly.

Most of the patients I saw that day looked like the really needed to be there due to illness, not a hygienic mishap like I had. When I found someone who looked like a receptionist, I explained why I was there and who I’d come to see. I was certain she’d respond with, “You did what?” I wouldn’t have blamed her If she’d banished me to he section of the waiting room where old hardline Communists were playing cards with a disguised Ratko Mladić as they waited for Tito’s ghost to join them.

The ENT turned out to be a nice guy. He didn’t make fun of me though that would have been easy. When I explained that I had been referred to him after my unsuccessful gynecological visit, all he said was:

“Who told you it was a good idea to clean out your ears with a Q-Tip?”

I wanted to shoot back:

“In Serbian, don’t you call those štapići za uši? Ear is part of the name. What was I supposed to do? It was an accident.”

At that moment, I recalled how the consumerist culture I was born into called them Q-Tips, a brand name synonymous with the product itself, like Kleenex or Band-Aid. Would you know what to do if someone asked you for a cotton swab, facial tissue, or adhesive strip? I’d need a minute, just like I did when deciding how to respond. I thought I needed someone who’d help me no questions asked, yet the one question this man did ask me seemed perfectly reasonable.

“I don’t know. That’s how I’ve always done it,” I said.

He removed the tip of the Q-Tip and told me that using a washcloth or anything less pointy would be a better choice to clean out my ears in the future. Alanis was right about the good advice that you just can’t take.

If necessity is the mother or invention, comfort is the mother of convention. My irony was that after trying an unconventional solution to a problem I created by doing something in a conventional manner, I ended up seeing a specialist for a dose of common sense.

Maybe doing things the way I’ve always done them isn’t always the best idea.

I’m no gynecologist, but I’ll take a look.

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shadowofcancer-blog1 · 7 years ago

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I Am Writing a Book. And Yes, I’m Freaked Out.

You always hear about people having deep life-realizations that change the course of their lives, but somehow you just don’t expect your biggest epiphany to come upon you in Jerry’s Deli.

When my mom got cancer, I took it personally.

I took the gruesome death sentence that was projected upon my only parent.

I took the nights watching her tossing in a hospital bed doped up on morphine.

I took the fear of death and endings and I tucked them into bed with me every night. I thought it was the worst thing that could ever happen to me. To her. To all of us.

I was angry. I was terrified. I felt like I was walking on a very slippery tight-rope that someone had taken the time to oil carefully as a cosmic joke, just to watch how we dealt with it.

The truth is, mom was walking on that tight rope, but I followed her onto it, terrified to lose her in the abyss below, knowing all the while that I did not actually have the power to stop that from happening.

There was a night early on in our cancer journey when my boyfriend insisted I leave the hospital to eat dinner. I had been sleeping on a cot in a corner of the hideous beige room for over a week and had literally not left the premises once at this point, convinced that my mere presence was helping avert any further disaster.

My sister agreed with him and unceremoniously shoved me out the door. The restaurant in question was just across the street, but that was of zero comfort to me. I told my sister to call me if anything changed during the 90 minutes I would be gone. (It is possible that I am the ultimate control freak.)

I sat at dinner. I didn’t eat. My leg kept twitching. This had been happening for a while now, but I had been too preoccupied to analyze what that meant.

I moved the food around on my plate. I went down my mental list of worries. And then… I looked around, finally noticing the fact that there were other people scattered around the tables in the restaurant.

It was just after Christmas. That time of year in LA when people are still aimlessly hanging out in different bars and restaurants and getting together with their friends. It’s almost New Year. A new beginning is coming. Most industries here are still closed down. People are happy…ish. They are laughing in their black leather jackets. Twinkle lights are hanging in random nooks and crannies looking mildly drunk, much like the people who are sitting next to them, people congratulating themselves on surviving another holiday season chockfull of dysfunctional families.

And there I was, watching them from a red leather booth, feeling like I was 100,000 miles away, wondering if I would ever feel “normal” again.

Nothing felt like it mattered.

Not really.

The things I was usually preoccupied with were the usual sort of things. Career stresses suddenly seemed like they were from another lifetime.

Money, which had always been a particularly sore subject for me during the best and worst of times was almost a joke at this point, seeing as our stay in the hospital was sure to cost hundreds of thousands of dollars that my family simply did not have. (Fun fact: The bills added up to well over a million.)

All my noisiest concerns were slipping down some faraway river and I was watching them drift by with mild interest.

It all seemed so irrelevant.

It was almost funny.

You always hear about people having deep life-realizations that change the course of their lives, but somehow you just don’t expect your biggest epiphany to come upon you in Jerry’s Deli. But there it was, and I was watching the stressed-out waitress absent-mindedly pour me some terrible coffee when my epiphany arrived:

Nothing mattered.

It felt a bit more like a balloon deflating, and a bit less like the clash of thunder I would have expected for such a moment.

All sound effects aside, the bottom line was that I suddenly realized that absolutely nothing mattered if the people I cared about were alive and healthy.

Everything else that had ever weighed on me in my entire life suddenly seemed so fixable.

Possible. Tiny. Idiotic.

It was like I had just learned the punchline to some horrible universal joke, and the other side was empty.

So I laughed.

Out loud.

You know… like a crazy person.

My boyfriend gave me a nervous look. The poor guy hadn’t gotten a tutorial for this situation anymore than I did. He had remained silent to most of my knee-jerk reactions lately. I didn’t blame him.

The rest of the night is a blur, but I vaguely remember hoping that the Deli Epiphany of 2013 would not leave me, and that I would be able to maintain this grand evolutionary perspective, and take on the rest of my life without fear.

My gut, in its own nonchalant kind of way was telling me that if I could maintain it, and if by some miracle, my mother “stayed ok” that this new way of life would be very freeing of all the anxiety I used to feel over the most menial of issues.

That night was years ago now.

In the past few years, I watched my mom’s cancer return.

I moved to a place where cancer patients go to live and where cancer patients go to die.

I got to know their families and their children, and we laughed together.

I cried with them later, when we lost their people, and I cried with them later, when their people healed from the monster that we all knew so well.

I learned that compassion is not what I thought it was.

When you are literally massaging the physical tumors of someone you have known for three months, and you feel like your heart is going to explode from the amount of pain you feel as you are doing so, you realize that we are all exactly the same.

And really, we are terribly fragile.

Bad fights with my mother have hit harder than ever, and in a different way - because even while we were snapping at each other, I knew that this could be one of the last times I would have the luxury of arguing with my mom.

I watched a very close friend die slowly.

I listened to her as two days before she left this world, despite all the pain she was in and the way her body had shriveled up like a tiny decaying leaf, she whispered to me that she felt so blessed to have people who love her so much around her, trying to help in any way they can.

I held her hand as she told me that she knew it was time to die, and she was ok with it.

I then drove to a different hospital to watch my mom turn uncomfortably in yet another hospital bed, hoping against hope that her next MRI scan would not show us any new “visitors.”

I have given speeches at funerals, without knowing what to say.

I have met 17-year-olds with brain tumors who were just trying to finish their schooling.

I talked with a man as he held his 3-year-old daughter who was suffering from Leukemia and weighed close to nothing. Her bald skull was shiny, her eyes wide in her face. She leaned her head on his shoulder as he spoke calmly with me, throwing out medical terms that we were both too familiar with.

His eyes were screaming. I knew that look. I felt that look.

I took a phone call a month later from someone who told me the little girl was now dead.

I still think of his eyes.

In the past few years, I have thought a lot about the meaning of life and death, and while this would be a perfect time to throw some beautiful words at you from Rumi and the greats, the truth is I have no answers. I don’t know why things are so unfair and impossible.

My mom getting cancer, and then getting “terminal cancer,” changed my life in many ways.

Cancer does that. We know. But it also changed me in a way I could not anticipate.

It made my life better.

I hate saying that.

I literally felt a wave of revulsion pass through me as I typed those words.

But I cannot deny that it is true.

When I decided to write my book, I decided to be honest. And the truth is that I had no idea what was important in life before the monster came knocking on my family’s door. I thought I did. I was awesome at thinking that I did. I could have given you lists, peppered with the right inspirational quotes and clever phrases about what was important.

But I was full of shit.

I thought I was good at losing people. At missing them. I had lost my dad at an early age. I lost one of my best friends to a motorcycle accident when I was a teenager. I lived in a country overrun by terror. I have worn gas masks in bomb shelters and been around a fair share of terrible things that made me appreciate the good things, or so I thought.

Nothing changed my life the way that this did.

So now what?

What do you do when you have this experience? What do you do when you are literally given a miracle?

As of 2017, only 1% of people who are diagnosed with stage IV pancreatic cancer are alive after 5 years.

Bile-Duct cancer sees similar numbers.

What do you do when you are the miracle?

You get overwhelmed, sure. You feel small. You get angry because the others should have a chance as well. You reach out when people fighting the same monster come into your life, because you know that this kind of fear and uncertainty is something no one should have to go through without a support system.

And if you are me, you start noticing a voice in your head that is repeating: Write down the story. Write down the story.

Because it is…. quite the story.

It is the story of how my mom got diagnosed with one of cancer’s most aggressive offerings. It is the story of how we ended up in an excellent hospital on Christmas Eve even though she had no medical insurance. It is the story of how she got an operation that most people are not even eligible for, and it is the story of how after all of this, after we came home and thought we might be lucky enough to experience “normal” again, I got a phone call telling me that I would now have to tell my mother “they” thought she had 6 months left to live.

Most importantly - it is the story of how she lived.

#cancer #pancreatic cancer #alternative #rivi litvin #alternative medicine #bile duct cancer #true story #real life #no chemo #miracles #shadow of cancer #cholangiocarcinoma

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braindamageforbeginners · 7 years ago

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Campbell’s “The Highwayman”

So. I'm starting treatment tomorrow. Which means this might be my very last post. Sort of.I should point out that, although I'm afraid of dying (that's hardly unique), that's never been my chief fear. Don't get me wrong, I'm very scared of that possibility (and it's still one of the likelier options), but, far and away, the greater fear has always been that I'll suffer some sort of severe, permanent brain damage resulting in noticeable neurocognitive defects. Or, to make that less cerebral (as, indeed, my oncologists will make me - literally), I'm worried that treatment will make me dumber. Or mess up my memory abilities. Or steal my scientific literacy. Or steal my literacy. Or just make me less... well, me. I'm not great at being myself; I think I'd be hilariously bad at being someone else.

I've written elsewhere about how neat and strange individuality is - just on a biological and biochemical level (I’ll be repeating and/or paraphrasing some stuff I’ve written elsewhere, so forgive me if you’ve read this). To help me out this time (because I no longer have enough time to be direct), I thought I'd use Zeno's Paradox. Zeno was an ancient philosopher, who came up with the following hypothetical, and I've updated it for the modern reader (you're welcome). Let's put LeBron James in a race against a tortoise; however, that's hardly fair, so we'll give the tortoise a 20 ft (6 m, to my communist friends) head-start. LeBron will never even reach the tortoise, because, before he can overtake the tortoise, he has to cross half of those 20 feet (10 feet); before he gets there, he has to cross half of 10 feet (5 feet), and so on. The numbers get ridiculously small, but you get the idea - you have to cross infinity to get anywhere (which is also what it feels like convincing the insurance company to pay for radiation treatment, but that’s a different topic for a different time). The fact that people walk didn’t deter or invalidate Zeno’s hypothesis (philosophy, while fascinating, has very little practical application); then, many centuries later, in one of those moments I live for, science and math overtook philosophy and invalidated it. In this case, it came in the form of calculus, which takes all those infinite little fractions and adds them together to get a real, usable number (unlike philosophy, mathematics is enormously helpful, albeit sometimes in highly specific situations). The biological punchline of all this is that you are the end-product of countless interactions, collisions, mistakes, and encounters, from the sub-atomic level to the moon’s gravitational force on Earth (the tides are important for life on this planet). Human beings are very similar; it takes a lifetime of small, slight, random encounters, interactions, and collisions to make you who you are; perfectly formed by countless infinitesimal incidents that we can’t recreate.

The second part of this concept requires a little help from you, dear reader (I know, homework; I’m sure there are a few of you would switch places with me to get out of it)(also, if that swap were possible, I guarantee you that I would take it, no questions asked). Make a list of things that make you who you are - in excruciating detail, and including the most minute and irrelevant details; from the stuff that barely counts (”has a weird recurring dream about Godzilla”)(I can’t be the only person that happens to) to the big stuff (”loves spouse/kids/dog”). To connect this to Zeno; this is an endlessly long list. You want to write a lot of assorted details (”fully remembers details from Thanksgiving 2010″) and random quirks. Now, you’re going to hand that list to a random stranger and ask them to cross off five items on this list; those things are no longer a part of you. According to Zeno (and my oncologists), those things probably aren’t important in the grand scheme of things, and you will still be you. But will you, really? Will you know who you are? Will you know what’s missing from that list? And can you get it back, or is it gone forever, or is it not worth it to recover what’s missing? And when do you stop being “you?” Obviously, there are a few big-ticket items that would permanently - and terribly - alter you (see that “loves spouse/kids/dog” one), but, if you look at that list, it’s not a dozen major things that define you, it’s the countless, tiny, unimportant things (I realize there’s some overlap with the Theseus’ Ship, but I like math). Again, according to Zeno and my oncologists, these probably aren’t worth fretting over, but it’s not them on the chopping block.

The concept that we’re working toward is a working understanding/empathy of what it’s like to live with brain damage/neurocognitive impairment/neurodegenerative disease, so I’ll be a little more blunt. Imagine a life in which you are unable to remember where you put your keys, phone, and wallet. The minute you set them down, bam, they’re gone from your mind, even if you leave them in the exact same place you always leave them. If you want to leave the house, you have to physically look for them until you find these items. You’ll still experience the same aggravation and frustration as anyone else, the only difference is, you’re usually unaware that there was a time - very recently - when this wasn’t a real problem. Those are the good days - the ones when you’re smart enough to observe these sorts of deficits. Other days - and these constitute at least 75% of your time - are when you don’t have that frame of reference; you’re just aggravated and upset that leaving the house now takes 45 extra minutes. And tired. And, a philosophical question that I can answer; what’s worse than being dumb? Being not-quite smart enough. Imagine a world where you’re intelligent enough to be ambitious - but not intelligent enough to accomplish those ambitions. That’s the fun little parting gift from neurosurgery #1. This is why I’m get a little paranoid whenever a clinician admits that there will be some brain damage - it’s like statisticians using the word “dismal,” it’s got to be really bad if they’re going to warn you about it prior to starting treatment. And there are still no guarantees that this will work, or even that it’ll buy me anything more than a few months, and that’s just a few months of my heart beating. What if this is as good as I will ever feel, for the rest of my life? I’m not feeling great right now, but the thought that this is as good as it gets is, to say the least, exceptionally unpleasant (on Thursday, in the final pre-serum screening, I was given three words to remember - “truck,” “apple,” and “blue” - and I couldn’t remember them at the end of a ten-minute interview. Not exactly hopeful, since I haven’t even started treatment, but the stress and lack of sleep is definitely a factor to consider). And that’s definitely not going to get better in the near future, unless my doctors start prescribing me more powerful drugs (with my luck, I come down with a horrible disease the minute the medical establishment starts getting paranoid about opiate precriptions)(but, hey, thinking positively, marijuana will be legal here in a few weeks)(I mean, uh, drugs are bad and you should never take them, kids)(unless they’re nearly-fatal drugs prescribed by a licensed doctor to, uh, kill very specific pieces of you)(yes, that’s how this medieval cancer treatment monkey-business works).

I’ve also thought a lot about the stages of grief, like you do when you’re mostly just waiting to either die or the treatment to work (and this sort of horrible uncertainty is - far and away - the most unpleasant emotional situation I’ve ever experienced), however, no one seems to have informed my limbic system, because I’m hitting all five of those simultaneously. Sort of, I’m still stuck in “bargaining,” I still can’t escape the idea that, maybe, with the right treatment and doctors, I’ll make it past this one - of course, the basic mathematic probability that I’ll almost certainly die within the next decade hasn’t really sunk in, but that’s also because I’m so exhausted and scared all the time that basic planning beyond a 72-hour window is completely beyond me (this might be some sort of self-preservation thing).

This is not to say that I’m automatically opposed to change, but the potential for dramatic and immediate neurocognitive change is dangerously high. Imagine the sorts of personality and emotional changes that occur just due to hormones, or antidepressants, or other drugs, and you can imagine the changes that can occur by dramatically altering my anatomy. Sort of; this is more like slowly stripping out pieces of me, and potentially who I am. Which is unpleasant enough, but, because I’m still tumbling down the rabbit hole, I recently learned something just as problematic: you only get one radiotherapy course per organ per lifetime. Which means I am pretty much all in on this gamble, and if this disease ever returns (spoilers; this is the second time I’ve come developed a malignant (or potentially malignant) glioma), thanks for playing. I will probably, thanks to my lab rat connections, be in line for whatever crazy new, experimental treatments that science can concoct, which is a good thing. But, how many AIDS patients died waiting for science to catch up to them? And, since we’re cutting funding for health insurance and medical research, is that realistically a good gamble? These things bother me in an abstract sense, but that 72-hour planning window is helpful in this situation.

This blog exists to painstakingly document my path so that the next person in my position might have an idea of what to do (or not to do), but, more importantly (to me, anyway), I’m doing this for the exact reason any human has ever done anything - from making the great pyramids to having children (although I realize the stated rationale at the time might be slightly different) - that there might be some small scrap of me that remains in the world, if the battle goes ill. It’s sort of like scribbling “Kilroy was here” in wet cement (and blog sites owned by Yahoo will last forever, right?). I’m not going to leave any grand legacy for the ages, unless everything goes much, much better than expected and, even then, I’m not likely to change the world (for all you future generations that might be reading this, your self-confidence decreases dramatically when faced with a grisly ending). This blog is also, if everything goes right, a baseline, a form of self-reflection for me to figure out a way to get back here, if everything goes well (again, even if everything goes flawlessly and better-than-expected, there are still going to be some neurocognitive changes). I don’t know who will be writing this thing in 24 hours, or in several weeks (major side-effects and problems are expected to start showing around Week #3), hopefully that guy won’t be too different from the person typing all this, and, if that’s the case, hopefully this will be some sort of guide to get back to normal (well, “normal” for me). And maybe someone else can get similar use out of this thing.

Obviously, there are going to be some days where I don’t feel like writing (if I go weeks without checking in, you can start to panic), or I’m too busy (if, God forbid, you develop cancer, you’ll spend many, many happy hours in the hospital), so I thought I’d just give a quick run-down, starting with height and weight (I realize those are mostly-irrelevant, and I won’t mention my height again, unless that changes). Hopefully, that won’t be too hard to keep up with over the coming weeks. HEIGHT: 6′ (183 cm) WEIGHT: about 210 lb (95-ish kilos) CONCENTRATION: Good, though I’m somewhat distracted; ability to start and focus on tasks is great, although completion isn’t always guaranteed (I still haven’t finished watching the latest episode of “Happy,” for example). Basic tasks are still pretty easy, but you don’t get many points for that outside of a psych researcher’s office. MEMORY: Not good, for me (I usually have close-to-eidetic memory), but still better than the average person’s. Still, using myself as a baseline, there’s been some noticeable-but-not-significant deterioration in that area, but, again, I’m not getting much sleep and I’m super-stressed. Still, I’m not forgetting the important stuff, yet. APPETITE: Good. I’m still eating as much as I usually do, which is a lot. ACTIVITY LEVEL: Good. I didn’t go to the gym today or yesterday, but since I went to the gym four or five times over the last week, I’m not going to beat myself up too much for it. SLEEP QUALITY: Nowhere near good, but much better than it was two weeks ago (but that’s not saying much, since I’ve gotten about 2-6 hours of sleep, on average, over the last month). Still, I’ve never slept very well (and I’m probably never going to sleep well again, not counting general anaesthesia), so it’s a little hard to gauge that. COORDINATION/DEXTERITY: Much, much, much better than it was this time a month ago, but my whole left side is still about 5-15% below-normal. I’m readily completing basic two-handed tasks, but I’m not going to be a concert pianist any time soon. Or in the next life, come to that (assuming there is a next life).

Tune in soon for the continuation of the reality-TV remake of “Flowers for Algernon.” And a very merry fuckin’ Christmas.

#brain cancer #brain tumor #brain damage #chemotherapy

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