Category Archives: Cancer

Cancer, Health, Politics, US History

Riders in the Storm

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Samain and the Radiation Moon

Wednesday gratefuls: Ruth. Sugar cream pie. Driving me to radiation today. Luke and Leo. Anne. Waxing crescent Moon. Christmas lights. Jackie and Rhonda. Shadow the mystery. Dog Poems. Billy Collins. Cold night. Darkness growing. Alise and Jenna. Skiing at A-Basin. Jon and my son. Brothers. Gabe, accepted to Montana. Black Bears. Mountain Lions. Wolves. Canada Lynx. Bobcats. Fox.

Sparks of Joy and Awe: Linear accelerators

Life Kavannah: Wu Wei    Shadow, my Wu Wei mistress

Week Kavannah:  Gevurah      “While Chesed is associated with flow, Gevurah provides the structure that allows this flow, acting like river banks to channel energy. It is seen as essential for establishing healthy boundaries, creating space for important work, and preserving what is most valuable.”

Tarot: Being a metaPhysician

One brief shining: With Hannukah presents, Christmas presents, a kitchen stool, a ceiling fan, sheets for my bed all delivered, most still in their boxes, my living room looks like a receiving dock, a few opened, those Silence Please mugs for Gabe and Ruth, the Tuskegee Airmen hoodie and baseball cap plus the crystal ball with the planets suspended in it for my son, jigsaw puzzles, a color chart for the wall for Ruth, the kitchen stool, the ceiling fan, the sheets, mechanical puzzles of the most difficult category still taped and sealed shut. Holiseason

 

Alise and Jenna pull me a bit this way and that, put the plastic mesh on, and get me a warm blanket to cover my bare chest. Then they leave the room, closing the foot and a half thick lead and concrete door, and I am alone, offering my cancer as a sacrifice to the gods of radiation with my hands gripping metal rods behind me, keeping my arms out of the way.

A flashing red light signals danger, stay out, yet I remain. The Clinac iX whirs and buzzes, its looming bulkiness hidden from me, rotating, bringing the beam to bear on just. the. right. spot.

And. Over. Alise of the cold hands helps me get up while Jenna strips off the sheet, wipes down the hand rests and the neck rest, readying the sliding bed for another sacrifice already in waiting.

From reading yesterday I learned that a Clinac costs $1.5 million dollars and requires between three and five hundred thousand dollars in maintenance per year. The clinic or hospital also builds a concrete room with thick walls and doors to house it.

 

Just a moment: Comey and James cases dismissed. Presidential fatigue an issue. Red tie guy wants a bigger ballroom. Nobody seems to know whose page they’re reading from in Ukraine peace negotiations. Whatever happened to Gaza?

This clown car administration honks its horns, spins in circles, confuses themselves while the rest of us gasp open mouthed at matters never associated with the Presidency. Like his press secretary assuring us that the President does NOT want to execute members of Congress. Relieved to hear it. Like wanting to build a yet bigger gilded ballroom, one out of proportion with the White House.

Riders in the storm. Into his world we’re thrown.

 

 

Art and Culture, Back Pain, Cancer, Friends, Health, Music

All Alone Behind the Lead Lined Door

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Samain and the Radiation Moon

Tuesday gratefuls: Todd. Alise. Varian. Clinac. Warm blankets. My plastic guide. Sniper rifle beams. Radiation entering my body, headed toward T4 bone marrow/lesion. Only nine sessions to go. Pain still gone. Hip, too. Wearing neck brace when I drive. My treatment November. Chart House. Luke and Leo coming today. Shadow inside. Yeah!

Sparks of Joy and Awe: Medical Engineering

Life Kavannah: Wu Wei    Shadow, my Wu Wei mistress

Week Kavannah:  Gevurah      “While Chesed is associated with flow, Gevurah provides the structure that allows this flow, acting like river banks to channel energy. It is seen as essential for establishing healthy boundaries, creating space for important work, and preserving what is most valuable.”

Tarot: Being a metaPhysician

One brief shining: No Cyberknife moving in its calculated dance around my body, this time a Varian Clinac iX, which Alise controls from a multi-screened room on the other side of the thick lead door that closes quietly, leaving me alone with a linear accelerator hulking behind me, and the precision locating beams-red and green-reading my location as the Clinac moves, buzzing and clicking.

 

Cancer: This session of radiation, my third, has a single target, the lesion in my bone marrow at T4. Instead of going all the way to Lonetree, I hop off 470 at Broadway and head up to Rocky Mountain Cancer Care (RMCC).

Most of the treatment in this case involves positioning my body accurately, using green and red lasers plus the plastic mesh that fits under my chin and over my bare upper thorax. Alise put it in place using the tattoos, small black dots inked on the sides of my chest by Todd during the CT planning procedure.

Since precision in aiming the beam of radiation is key both to killing the cancer cells and not damaging the rest of me, I get the need for multiple ways of saying go here, not there to the radiation. In and out in twenty minutes, less than five of which involved actual radiation.

 

Back and hip pain: The ablation continues to give me a pain free left lower back and upper left. The hip feels mostly good, too. Just a bit of tweak if I move in an odd angle.

Lower back right still has significant tightness, a little pain. Since the ablations only work on the arthritis, Kylie told me to expect pain from the bulging discs to continue. She was right.

Even so, a huge improvement. My driving stamina, which I will test each day going to RMCC, has improved, too, but not nearly as much as I had hoped. I was not in agony on the drive home, but I was still pretty uncomfortable. That’s with a fifty minute drive out, some sitting and then a drive back for fifty minutes.

I’m going to up my resistance work, stretching, see if I can do better with stronger core muscles.

This sort of adaptation, relief and its limitations, continue the journey of an aging body/self.

 

Opera: Not usually my thing though I love Wagner. I know, I know, an anti-semite, but what an artist! Watched an opera initiated by Yin, of Scott and Yin, with other members of the Chinese Heritage Foundation and staged by the San Francisco Opera.

An amazing, engaging, important work. The Journey of the Monkey King. If you can see it, take the chance. It will not disappoint you. Both libretto and the staging are, in my opinion, genius.

Aging, Cancer, Feelings, Fourth Phase, Hermitage, Memories, Myth and Story, Reimagine. Reconstruct. Reenchant., Shadow Mountain

Alchemical work

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Samain and the Radiation Moon

Thursday gratefuls: Joanne. Diane. The Alembic. Jung. Freud. Rogers. May. Frankl. Maslow. Satir. Fromm. Adler. Horney. Erikson. Paul Goodman. Adorno. Marcuse. Benjamin. Habermas. Unamuno. The hermeneutics of suspicion. Ricoeur. Guides from my student days. The theology of liberation. Cornel West. Shadow Work. Ivan Illich.

Sparks of joy and awe: A day of rest

Life Kavannah: Wu Wei    Shadow, my Wu Wei mistress

Week Kavannah:  Hakarat Hakov   Gratitude.    “Who is rich? Those who rejoice in their portion.” Perkei Avot 4:1

Tarot: Being a metaPhysician

One brief shining: Shadow, shadow work, the work done but unrecognized, unpaid, unappreciated housework, child rearing, transporting yourself to work, self checkout, pumping your own gas, making your own travel arrangements, assembling products that come in pieces, maintaining a yard and a vehicle noticed and named by radical thinker, Ivan Illich, in his book, Shadow Work. How much shadow work do you do?

Alembics. “…historically used by alchemists and for producing medicines, perfumes, and alcohol, the word can also be used metaphorically to mean something that refines or transmutes.” Gemini

I’ve begun to think of my life in terms of alembics. When was I thrown into a life situation, either by my own choice or by outside circumstance that resisted logic, yet compelled me to respond in unexpected, unusual, new ways?

A major early almebic? The death of my mother. No way to reason my way through that. A moment of dark transformation, carried without thought into the dark recesses of my heart, clashing with a changed world, and not well. In spite of being in a family, I sat in this alembic alone, feeling the fires of fear, doubt, grief lick up and around my stunned self.

This transmutation produced no gold. No, it produced a broken soul, one ready for abandonment, for sudden shifts from light to dark, from innocence to intoxication. Yes, the second alembic, which contained the first, grew from days at Phi Kappa Psi and Wabash where I learned to smoke and to drink.

An alembic that would not shatter until March of 1976 when I began treatment at a Hazelden outpatient clinic in Minneapolis. Getting sober allowed me to gather in pieces of the dark time and begin to transform them into psychic gold. To understand that the grief, the agony, the isolation (self-imposed) had forced me to mine my inner resources in ways and at a time most people went to prom and figured out what to do with their lives.

Other alembics. The Peaceable Kingdom. Seminary. Adopting Joseph. Vietnam era protests. Studying philosophy and anthropology. Marrying Kate. Andover with its gardens, dogs, bees. Writing. Shadow Mountain. Kate’s illness and death. Cancer. CBE. Converting to Judaism. Old age with a terminal illness, the fourth phase.

I like the use of alembic to describe these times because it recognizes that the pressures and fractures and falls and emergence shape us in ways unpredictable, unknown, yet in which we have no choice but to participate as best we can.

Are you in an alembic right now? Or, have you emerged from one recently? Or, long ago. How did it transform you? How is it transforming you?

Cancer, Colorado, Health, Mountains, Science, Shadow Mountain

An Inner Glow

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Samain and the Summer’s End Moon

Tuesday gratefuls: Morgan at Evergreen Orthotics. Neck braces. Abby Price, P.A., at Panorama Orthopedics. Steroid injection. Today. Looking forward to both. Cartoons. Anime. Manga. Horror. Fantasy. Science fiction. Mystery. Drama. Literary fiction. Albrecht Dürer. Arcimboldo. Breughel. Rembrandt. Poussin. Goya. Velasquez. Turner. Holbein.

Sparks of Joy and Awe: World Art

Life Kavannah: Wu Wei

Week Kavannah:  Hakarat Hakov   Gratitude.    “Who is rich? Those who rejoice in their portion.” Perkei Avot 4:1

Tarot: Being a metaPhysician

One brief shining: Once again under the beam of a radiation  device remember radiation poisoning from atomic bombs yet here I go exposing myself to even more high energy particles for their harmful effect on human tissue, yes, their harmful effect aimed not at enemy cities, but at enemy cells, rogue multipliers who want to consume every bit of my body.

If you went into the crawlspace under my house, you would see black plastic sheeting covering the floor and tight against the short walls. Outside a vented flying saucer like device with a whirling fan sucks air from beneath the sheeting and disposes of radon, a naturally occurring radiation contained in soil and rock and water. Many homes here in the Rockies have radon mitigation devices.

When I traveled through southern Utah, several years ago, I stopped at the Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument. When I got out of the Tundra pulling Merton’s last possessions (Kate’s Dad), I hiked around the area.

Small wooden signs in National Park style had yellow painted letters that read: Uranium Mine, stay out.  Chains across the entrances reinforced the signs. These were modest as mines go, more like human sized burrows reaching back into the rock of the Kaiparowits Plateau.

When Kate and I began to look for housing after we decided to move to Colorado, a good deal caught our eye, the Candelas Development. Cheap land, good prices on interesting homes, and midway between Boulder and Denver with unobstructed views of the Front Range.

What’s not to like? Its proximity to the long closed Rocky Flats nuclear production facility for one. Rocky Flats, now a Superfund site, blocked off by chain link and razorwire, made nuclear triggers for the military.  An ongoing controversy focuses on plutonium found in the unmitigated land surrounding the Superfund site, the Rocky Flats Wildlife Refuge, and the land under the Candelas Development.

It’s been declared safe over and over again by regulators, but critics say that no amount of plutonium exposure is healthy. We did not choose to buy there.

Radiation occurs in so many places, some of human artifice, most part of Mother Nature’s collection of elements distributed over the Planet’s surface and within her mass.

I’m glad some clever scientists figured out how to harness radiation for peaceful uses like nuclear power plants (looking at you, Bill Schmidt), smaller reactors that power submarines and aircraft carriers, and fighting cancer.

Starting on Monday of next week, I’ll have the first of ten doses of lower energy radiation to kill a lesion in the bone marrow of my T4 vertebrae. I will wear my red t-shirt with the radiation hazard logo in yellow.

 

 

Cancer, Friends, Health

The Missing Hour

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Samain and the Summer’s End Moon

Thursday gratefuls: Nurse Marissa. Dr. (Kirk) Harter. Dr. Garapati. The Radiology Tech. The MRI machine that I never saw. Swedish Hospital. Kate, always Kate. The view from a hospital bed. Tara, my sweet friend. Eleanor, who played all day with Shadow. Being driven. Being helped. Rabbi Jamie’s birthday on the fourth. Mayo, helping my buddy, Tom.

Sparks of Joy and Awe:  Propofol

Life Kavannah: Wu Wei

Week Kavannah:  Histapkot.  Contentment. Acceptance.                       I’m comfortable with who I am and with what I have.

Tarot: Being a metaPhysician

One brief shining: A ritual of infantilization begins with go to this room on this floor, continues with a nurse telling you to remove all of your clothes, put on some of ours that tie in the back and let your butt hang out, now lie down in the bed and I’ll bring you a nice warm blankie before asking you so many, so many questions they will seem like a lullaby. Which they were.

 

The missing hour: After all of Marissa’s questions had been asked, the IV placed, an oximeter taped to my finger, and a blood pressure cuff attached to my arm, plus one more warm blankie for good measure, Dr. Harter, barely old enough to shave, came by my bed and asked me many of the same questions again. We chose conscious sedation and I signed a temporary reversal of my DNR just in case the anesthesia stopped my heart. That’s something easily and non-invasively fixed. Or so Dr. Harter promised. Happy to observe that was not necessary.

After a half an hour or so of watching people and beds come and go in the Ambulatory Care Unit, a Radiology tech kicked the lock off on my bed and pushed me, pretty fast and confidently, to a large bed-sized elevator to go down one floor to imaging.

A small bay in the room with POWERFUL MAGNETS ALWAYS ON, as the sign read, was the last thing I saw before my missing hour. The tech, an older woman, late sixties I’d say, hooked me up to a machine to read my vitals: heart rate 69, bp 119/72, O2 sat at 97 with a canula, a few other numbers I couldn’t understand. She then came over and pushed some saline into the IV.

Dr. Garapati mused about the advances in medicine I’d seen in my lifetime. I really wasn’t as aware of them as he seemed to think. Still, he seemed nice.

Dr. Harter came on my left, or IV side, and attached a line to my IV, then that line to a hanging bag. This will take just a minute to act…and then I was in recovery, wondering where my missing hour had gone.

A strange sensation, to have no memory at all of the MRI, a good sensation for claustrophobic me. If I have to have another MRI, this is the method I’ll choose. How many times in life can we bypass something terrifying (to me) with the help of so many nice people?

 

 

 

Back Pain, Cancer, Cooking, Coronavirus, Politics, Post Polio, Sport, US History

How Great an America is This?

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Samain and the Summer’s End Moon

Sunday gratefuls: Dodgers win the World Series! Rabbi Jamie’s hug. Joe. Alan. Jim. Corey. Irv. Matt. Torah study led by Luke. Bagels and schmear. Joanne in rehab. Back to real time, standard time. Dark Winds. Everwood.  Heather. Tramadol. The boiler. The mini-splits. My breath. Sight. Touch. Taste. Hearing. Smell. YHWH.

Sparks of Joy and Awe: Home

Life Kavannah: Wu Wei

Week Kavannah:  Histapkot.  Contentment. Acceptance.                       I’m comfortable with who I am and with what I have.

Tarot: Being a metaphysician

One brief shining: Sitting in regular chairs, my head unsupported by a back rest, fasciculations begin, muscles straining and flexing, moving under the skin, distracting me from the words of Hagar and the Angel, from El-Roi, the God who sees, I don’t notice it, the wobbling, at first, until my shoulders get sore and I’m no longer able to concentrate, be sharp, as my head tilts right, polio wreaking one last not so subtle blow.

 

So. I’m taking notice. Part of my fatigue, maybe a big part, follows from my increasing inability to hold up my own head. Dr. Eunberg diagnosed it, post-polio syndrome. I’ve been to an orthotists’ office and been told my situation has no other instances. They’re going to modify soft collars for me. We’ll see.

Beginning to feel like my body’s falling apart literally from the neck down. A tumor on T4 needing radiation. Arthritic L1-L5 nerves needing ablation. A right torn labrum possibly needing surgery. I mean, geez.

I’m so far ahead of my insurance company with expensive cancer drugs, pet scans, mri’s, and radiation. That makes me feel somewhat good. Even so…

 

Food: Had the last of the sheet pan meal with my Cherry Tomatoes and Beets. So. Good. Planning more sheet plan cooking, easy, quick, lots of Veggies. Of all the health maintenance matters, cooking for myself has proved the most challenging. Just hard to pull off.

CookUnity has been ok, but just ok. Pricey and with time constraints that make it difficult to use. Some of the meals are tasty, many of them edible, but only edible.

May not be getting enough calories, protein.

 

Sport: What a world series! Game 7, extra innings, Dodgers behind with two outs in the ninth…and Rojas hits a home run! Tie game. In the 11th, the 11th inning of Game 7 of a world series with a historically long game 3, 18 innings, a double play ended the Canadian’s dreams. Dodger’s repeat. Not since the Yankees 1998-2000 run has a world series champion repeated.

Meanwhile, back in forlorn football country, JJ McCarthy returns from injury absence. Will he play like a future franchise quarterback? Or, will he rip out the hearts of a Twin City’s fan base already inured to the breaks never falling their way. If the Vikings didn’t have bad luck, they’d had have no luck at all.

 

Just a moment: SNAP. Medicaid. Obamacare. Taking money literally from the mouths of the poor, taking away their final recourse for medical care, raising health care premiums to the    sky for even middle class Americans. Funneling the money “saved” into the pockets of oligarchs. How great is this America?

Cancer, Health

Let’s Get Radiated!

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Samain and the Summer’s End Moon

Shabbat grateful: Joe Greenberg. Joanne. Shadow, the aggressive chewer. 26 degrees. Dr. Carter. Todd. Jenna. Another CT. RMCC. Ruby. Her Snow shoes. A full tank. Morning darkness. The festival of Samain, the final harvest. The fallow time. Winter is coming. That scene in Dark Winds, season 3, where Robert Redford and George Martin play chess in the Navajo Tribal Police jail cells.

Sparks of Joy and Awe: Dodgers force game 7

Life Kavannah: Wu Wei

Week Kavannah:  Histapkot  Contentment     Acceptance.    I’m comfortable with who I am and with what I have.

Tarot: Being a metaphysician

One brief shining: A purple haired, antennaed alien, and Todd settled me once again into a CT sled, gave me a warm blanket, and heated a plastic mesh that fit just below my chin, over both sides of my bare chest almost to my belly button, pressed it in place, then hit the button that sent me under the whirring scanner after which Todd gave me two black tattoos, ouch, to insure correct placement for my 10 sessions of radiation.

 

Health: Drove 45 minutes to RMCC (Rocky Mountain Cancer Care) off Dry Creek Road in Littleton. I was a little unhappy because I had liked Dr. Leonard, but he was unavailable so I had to see Dr. Carter. While driving, it occurred to me that I might like him, too.

A handsome man in a rugged way, gray-blue eyes, short cut curly hair, and wearing gray scrubs, he entered the room smiling. I liked him right away. May sound silly, but it matters a lot to me that I have a good fit with my many doctors. Hell, they’re a significant part of my social life after all.

He went through my chart and my symptom list more carefully than any doc I’ve had. I felt cared for in his attention to the details. He and I laughed a lot.

I agreed to ten rounds of lower dose radiation rather than three higher dose sessions since my T3 vertebrae had been radiated in 2023 and T4 is right below it. Radiation can weaken the vertebrae and there was a spot where the T4 radiation might overlap with the older site. The lower dose per day decreases the chance of any harm because of that. It’s my spine, after all.

A kind man, too, Dr. Carter arranged the necessary planning CT to happen right after our visit, saving me a trip. Thanks, doc. Jenna, a CT tech, dressed as the alien. It was after all, Halloween.

Cancer. I’ve had many years now to consider it. An inner assassin. My body turned against me. A chronic disease. And, it is all those things. Yesterday I considered it sui generis. Simply an organism, if a runaway cell can be called that, cancer follows its own path, doing what it needs to do to survive. As I, the larger organism do, too.

My cancer is crafty, cunning. Consider that I’ve had the collective wisdom of decades of experiments, scientific break throughs, surgery, radiation, and drugs. It’s beaten them all. I admit to a grudging admiration for its tenacity.