tarna

Damn doomsday preachers!... tossing out the old liver and getting a new one isn't an option I suppose? Sort of a sharp reminder to enjoy every day to the fullest and not take tomorrow for granted. Even if/when they give you your years back, it never hurts to spend more time being happy than being grumpy. Mate, still hoping for the best Thanks all. Gorth, considering my dismal prognosis, I'm not even elligable to go on a transplant list. Can't really disagree. Organs don't just grow on trees and organs that come available should be given to someone younger and get more milage out of it. After all, someone had to die to supply it. Giving it to a 50 year old would only buy me a couple of more years until some other organ failed. Math on that decision is real easy. What isn't easy is my daughter keeps trying to get me to accept part of hers. Since we are pretty much clones of each other I'm sure the tissue typing would match. My only answer to that is that I'm not going to buy a couple of more years of life at the expense of hers. She could respond that by not taking her offer that I'm cheating her out of a couple more years with me. That would be a pretty dirty trick and luckily we love and respect each other too much for that kind of guilting. The newest plan is to run a scan to 'map' out the blood flow through my liver to learn which blood lines the tumours have taken over for their own use. If the insurance company approves it, the Docs will then inject around 30,000 micro-spheres of Yttrium-90 into those blood supplies to irradiate the tumours dirrectly. The problem is that this is a good treatment of liver cancer, not kidney cancer that has taken up residence in my liver. Edit...how do get the page where I can update my signature?

Update as to what's new and exciting lately. Daughter was out recently. We spent a great deal of 'My' money and got some very neat trinkets and had a great time. Had a really nice bit of private time in the mountains and 'broke' the pendant that I had made for us. Apparently I wrote the service wording right since she was very moved by it. All in all, we were both very happy with it. Still working close to full time at my job and freaking loving it. Had a new PET scan tuesday however. Present chemotherapy is not working any longer. For as long as I can remember, I have always had an extremely strong and adaptive recuperation immune system. Apparently my original cancer cells also hold that adaptive system. I've now been through two seperate chemo treatments and the damned cancer has rapidly adapted to both. My oncologist has taken away my 2-3 years and replaced that statement with "I'm very, very worried". That's very freaking nice. Maybe killing the messanger wasn't such a bad idea. Anyway...we are now experimenting 'outside the box'. He now wants to start me out on an old chemo treatment by running a small cathater up my femoral artery to the blood artery that supplies blood to my liver. The latest scan shows the the existing 11+ tumors there had grown to 9 X8 cm each. By my math that means a little more than 3 inches diameter each. That seems like approx 330 cu/inch total area in addition to whatever my normal liver volume should be. Calling my liver 'swollen' seems a bit of an under statement. Pain has increased and I'm pretty sure that my Doc will not take my suggestions. He would rather keep his license to pratice medicine I presume. My favorite person in the Universe is here with me now again for a week so life is good again. We're spending money again like it was simple paper and having a good time. Maybe I've been able to talking her into moving in with me for whatever remaining time I have. May I freaking live forever :wink:. Speaking of 'Freaking'...Roger Waters throws a 'Freaking' fantastic concert if 'The Wall' by Pink Floyd is your kind of show. I grant you that I'm old but I thought I might have to wet myself during the show. Might have been the show but it might have been old age and a small bladder. I'll leave the decision up to you. You might want to add possible senility to the mix as well :wink:. Even with the scalpers fees it was a good show. Anyway...that's it for now. Later.

Hard to say. Virgins are so difficult to come by these days. :wink: After about three days the remaining lobster started to smell untrustworthy. I have no interest in lobster so it's entirely on my wife to finish the plate before her. I'm more of a fried this and that kind of palate. Not terribly sophisticated. I can't tell the difference between mayonnaise and miracle whip.

Yes, I'd like an update as well. I hope Tarna's doing ok. Doing alright. Started to post around the Holidays and decided against it. Let's see...remaining kidney function swings between 56 and 72 percent. Anything below 60% forbids a CAT scan. Doc got the insurance co to approve a PET scan. PET scans are far better ( and expensive! ) but only about 10% or less of patients with my of kind of kidney cancer actually shows up on a PET scan ( something odd about this flavor of cancer ). Luckily mine showed up and my Doc says that if it showed up once then it will always show up. Since the PET and CAT scans are radically different in format and quality, my Doc had to have the Radiologist read the scans and compare the info for him. Looks like a 'no-growth' at present. I'll believe it more when they do another CAT or PET scan near the end of this month. Got to visit my daughter about the middle of last month. She lives in another state and I had not told her yet. She laughed and said "Finally! Good riddance old man!" :wink: We talked about keep-sakes and whatnot. Some made sense while some others caught me by surprise. One thing she asked for was a pendant. She and a close friend of hers had matching pendants of half a heart. Her friend was killed in a car accident nearly two years ago. During the funeral arrangments my daughter got to be very close to the girl's parents. When her friend was buried, her parents buried her with the heart pendant she shared with my daughter. She wants something similar with me. Since I plan to get cremated ( as does she ), the materials are very limited. I decided to make it out of jet. Jet is a very hard form of coal that was used as cameo jewelry in the early 1900s. Being that jet is also one of the jewelry materials indicating Wiccan priesthood, I just happen to have lots of it on hand and am familiar working with it. It has a hardness of around 3.5 ( and takes a very glossy shine ) while wood is probably somewhere around 2. I'll make a flat disk, carve something appropriate into the jet, groove the pendant so that it may be broken easily. When she comes out at the end of this month, she and I will go somewhere peacefull in the mountains and break it. I'll already have some silver chains so we can wear them from that point on. Kinda novel and I look forward to it. Let's see what else...Hmm. Made up another ridiculously large lobster meal for the wife last Valentine's day. See attachment. That lobster tail in the middle is 1.25 pounds. Other items are lobster medallions on saffron rice ( Saffron is expensive and has little taste. I only used it to add color to the rice so that it showed up against a white plate ). Lobster and angel hair pasta with a lemon cream sauce. The one new obnoxious addition ( required for each of these meals ) is lobster chowder. Didn't turn out too bad actually. I forget the weight of the steak. Various other sundry items. Working as close to full time as I can get. Still tire easily but I'm not getting my endurance and strength back by sitting on my ass. Still taking morphine and percocet. Every so often I'll stop taing my pain meds for a day to try to estimate my internal 'situation' by the pain level. I generally only quantify pain by...I can ignore this...I can work with this...I cannot sleep with this...and ...this really F**king hurts! :wink: I still seem to be in the "I can work with this" pain level. Oh...I'm also going to make talking scrapebooks for my wife and daughter. I will use artists' sketch books ( I'll show you guys when I get them finished ). I found several sellers online that sell blank greeting cards with ten second recordable circuits for 2 for a dollar US. The circuits will go into the scrapbooks and will narrate each page as turned. I'm also going to use specially embossed leather covers. The artist is being a problem so if it doesn't got worked out very quickly I'm just going to buy a couple of samples and back-engineer her work. I would rather pay her for her talent and creativity but one way or the other, this is going to happen. Going to work my wedding ring into the cover of the book for my wife and my ring from my previous marrage into the cover of my daughter's book. Both will have a copy of my pentagram also worked into the leather ( my kid gets the original ). Various other crap like amber and whatnot also worked into the leather. Daughter already has my Athame, Wand, Cord and Measure ( a Wiccan would understand ) and she willl also get my Book. Normally Books are burned at the death of a Witch but what are they going to do to me for passing mine on to my daughter, take away my birthday? Screw 'em. In the ear. :wink: That's enuf for now. I expect to see quite a few tl;dr Add yourself to the line above that starts with Sc :wink: Later folks. Hope good fortune upon you and yours. tarna/scott

Cancer Doc is trying to get emergency insurance approval to try a new med tomorrow. It's an IV drip unfortunately so I'll possibly be spending a couple of hours each Friday getting an IV. I guess the alternative could be worse. :wink:

Last month's CAT scan show that my cancer was reponding ( reducing in size ) to the chemo meds. Yesterday, the new scan shows that the cancer in my liver has tripled in size. Getting a little annoyed at this. I get good news and start feeling like I might have a 'regular' life and someone kicks me in the ass. Celebrated Yule on Saturday. The wife's son and his wife and the two grandkids came over to spend the evening ( and get their gifts ) . Wife made up a meal of all sorts of good stuff. A large ribeye roast that was so tender I didn't need a knife to eat it. Got a large slice on it almost eaten when I had to run to puke it up. Spent the rest of the day sleeping. Doing that a lot lately. Between the nausea and fatigue I'm not getting much social time in. Still working 40 hours a week. That's a plus. On the bright side, I have an old POS laptop. A P3 333Mh with 256 Mb RAM that has no ethernet port and 1 USB 1.1 port. What a prize eh? I know you guys are jealous of it. I pretty much just use it to play games on when I'm on the go. Found a wireless gizmo that would actually load and be recognized by the computer. This laptop won't recognize a USB flash drive above 8 Gb. Now I can go online next time I'm in the hospital and not mess with their frigging website censors. Michael Jackson porn here I come!

Just figured out what I can do to put myself in the Christmas spirit. We've had snow here for a while now. It's not melting as quickly as usual. I'm going to pack a couple of fair sized boxes with snow and then giftwrap them and leave them on my porch as though they were dropped off. Since many in this neighborhood are little more than walking garbage that would steal their mother's fillings, I'll give 'em a means to practice their future vocation. Thought about filling the boxes with dirt or rocks but the ground is still frozen and they might return the rocks through my new windows.

Picked up a couple of gift cards today for my boss and dispatcher. They've both treated me extremely well throughout all this. Had someone else write on the envelope To- 'boss/dispatcher' with all my love. signed- 'the name of a tech that they both really hate'. He's been long gone from the company but I still amuse myself as his expense at times. I was just going to throw them on the desks anonymously but decide to do it this way. Over the years I'll make a small donation to some charities that I used to do volunteer work for but I send it in the form of a money order with his name and address on it so he gets on the 'begger's mailing list'. They get their money and I get amusement. It's a win-win. His opinion in all this doesn't count.

Received my Roger Waters tickets in the mail today. Nearly two hundred dollars extra in shipping-handling-scalpers fees. Oh well...they're good tickets and I probably wouldn't have gotten them myself had I tried through the regular ticket outlet. Very much looking forward to the show. Still somewhat sick with my cold and my hair is now growing in white. Don't know if it is due to the chemo or the surgery trauma. Kinda gives me that 'distinguished old f**ker' look though. At least until they hear me open my mouth. ( God, I wish I was on that flight with that s**t-stain Alec Baldwin )

Gives me something to do when I'm not adding names to my 'Better Dead' list of those that have wronged me in the past. Those on 'the list' should be glad that I'm still faily stable.

Nobody will touch me as far as life insurance goes. I'm definitely a bad risk . My wife already had a $50,000 policy on me from her work and we bought several years ago a policy that pays for the house if either of us die. That one will be kinda handy since we lost most all of our equity when the housing market crashed. I've got some things to do around the house to make it easier for my wife to function with it. Things like changing all the valves to 90 degree turn ball valves, relocating the main shut off valve for the house from under the house to somewhere inside. Some automation. Some electrical changes. Little things like that. Medical insurance I already had through my work. Hadn't realized how good it was until now. My maximum 'out of pocket' annual expense limit is $2,000. My first hospital stay was billed at around $95,000. The insurance knocked about $60,000 off of it due to cost negotiation and paid the remaining amount. My share was around $360 which counted toward my $2,000 cap. My chemo meds are $9,100 per month ( for 28 capsules ) but my copay is $30. Because of this we are doing alright financially and I don't have to find myself a fatal 'accident' to keep from bankrupting my family.

Don't give a rat's ass about my 'blood family'. Treacherous (sp?) slime all. I've presently set my 'expiration date' to around 5 1/4 years. If I am still working by that time, my wife will get a regular pension check for me for the rest of her life. If I assume room temperature prior to that, she gets a one-time payment. Haven't gotten the numbers on that yet. She has a policy from work that will give her $50,000 which sounds good but won't go that far when you consider funeral costs and remaining credit card debt and what not. I've already told her not to spend one cent more than needed and have considered declaring bankruptcy and divorcing her prior to dying to separate our debt. Gotta talk to a lawyer about these things. I'd forgotten that you'd seen part of my collection. Good to see that someone appreciates it. We'll have to talk more.

I bought them from one of those ticket scalpers before they even went on sale. Paid nearly $600 USD for the pair. They're good tickets and I expect it to be a freeking fantastic show but was a little pressed when I saw what they were charging. It was either them or take my chances on the morning of sale on a computer at work. I don't have a 'bucket list' per say but this concert was something I really wanted to see. I hope it lives up to expectations. Oh and I caught a cold virus recently. I'm F**king immune compromised as it is and I catch a cold. I'm treating it symptomatically and since I've been on oral and intraveneous antibiotics for the last 4 weeks or so I'm not overly concerned yet. Concidering my recent bout with sepsis though I'm paying a little more attention to my health than usual. Learning that you are no longer immortal is kinda disheartening :wink: I've always had a very good recuperative system and it still seems to be active ( my surgical wounds healing very quickly ) so I've still got that going for me. My wife is taking all this fairly well ( as well as can be expected ) and is being supportive. We make jokes about the situation once in a while. She still isn't taking too well to some of my remarks though. My humour tends to be a little 'dark' at times. I haven't told my daughter yet. She is pregnant and is due next Feb. I'll go visit and give her an abbreviated version shortly afterwards. The rest of my family doesn't know and will not know. I don't like any of them and the next best thing to reading their obituaries in the paper would be seeing them read mine. Deciding if I want my wife to send them a copy posthumously or not. Probably not. Let 'em wonder.

I GOT TICKETS FOR ROGER WATER'S "THE WALL LIVE"! Also got my drain lines removed from my side so I can now start exercising and stretching so the weight I hope to gain comes back properly. Also...my oncologist ( cancer dude ) says that at least some of my cancer is responding to the chemotreatment ( only one month ) so that's a plus. Start round two in a week. Presently enjoying a 10mg percocet with a double rum and coke chaser. Life is good :wink: Did I say that I GOT TICKETS FOR ROGER WATER'S "THE WALL LIVE"!

Sorry about going 'dark' for so long. I got sprung from the hospital a couple of weeks ago. Returned to work the next Monday to find that the work computers had a similar filter as did the hospital. Since I wasn't overly interested in working on the computer ( chemo, IV antibiotics and such ), I only just fixed my internet connection at my house ( bad router ). Anyway, my return trip to the hospital was after almost a week having returned to work under limited duty. On the fifth day ( Friday ), I couldn't stand up lond enough to properly complete my morning shower. Had to squat down every few minutes so as to not pass out from low blood pressure. The wife was off that day and I didn't want her to find me face down/ass up in the bathtub . After all the poking and prodding I've had done, most of my dignity has been stripped away but I still don't want to be found dead in my tub :wink: . Wife took my to my oncologist ( didn't know where else to start and I wasn't very coherent at this point ). Dehydration, fever and a very high white cell count ( infection ) was the immediate findings. They immediately admitted me into a nearby hospital. A scan showed a absess/fistula containing about a litre worth of slop that I didn't really want getting into my system. Apparently I was a day or so from becoming septic. Had the absess popped, that probably would have been it for the kid. IV antibiotics round the clock for nearly two weeks. Oh...I almost forgot the best part. I am only semi-coherent while the surgeon is telling me that they need to open me up again and fiddle around with the leaking intestine that was causing the absess in the first place. At this point my morale is rock bottom. They compromised by stabbing me in the left flank with ice picks and installing a couple of fairly uncomfortable drain lines that drain into a small round bulb. Neat huh? At home now and working limited duty part time at work and may have the drain lines removed sometime soon. That will also DC the daily intravenous antibiotics that I have to hook up to the central/PICC line in my upper arm that pipes over to my heart. Then I get to take a real shower instead of bathing out of a sink. Chemo is going well. At least in that I'm not loosing my hair or and other noticeable side effents. A couple of months of this and I'll get another cat scan to compare to the old one to see if the remaining cancer in my liver and intestine had reduced. Chemo is a pill called Sutent BTW. Checked with my pension people to learn the if I die before I'm 55, my wife will only get a settlement check as a death benefit. However, if I hang on and continue working for 5.25 years, she gets my full monthly pension check. She also has a life insurance policy from her work that will pay her $50,000 as soon as I assume room temperature. Between all that and the house insurance paying of the house, she might be doing pretty well as a widow. I've been teasing her that I'm finally going to be that good provider that she alway wanted. Anyway...that's it for now. Thanks for the thoughts and concerns. I'll touch base again soon.