If you’re like me, you’ve probably never witnessed a bone marrow biopsy procedure before. That’s right, even though I’ve had more procedures done to me than I care to remember, I have never actually seen the procedure being performed on me. This is because, 1. I always have to lie on my stomach, and 2. I’ve always been too scared to try and look.
But during today’s procedure, I mustered up the courage and asked my herculean wife to take pictures of it so I could finally see what it was all about. I call my wife herculean because she’s been exceptionally strong and courageous for me throughout my entire cancer experience; and after I saw the pictures, it amazes me even more how strong and courageous she really is. I know for certain that if the roles were reversed and I had to be there to support her during one of these procedures, especially during the first time, I would pass out. For real.
I also asked my wife to take the pictures so I could share them with others who may be interested in learning and seeing what a bone marrow biopsy is all about. But please be warned, these pictures may be disturbing for some people. If you’re still interested, please click the more link.
So what’s the deal? Does the federal ruling mean that homosexuals can now openly serve in the military? If so, how does this impact the 14,000 servicemembers who have already been kicked out because of their sexuality? Does congress still need to repeal the old DADT law or has this ruling effectively done that? Why is President Obama allowing his administration to object to the judge’s ruling and defend a law that he thinks is wrong to begin with? And what about the survey?
So many crazy questions surrounding this important civil rights debate.
I love electricity. And I love it even more when I can’t have it. Today a brutal thunderstorm came through my area and took down many trees and power lines in its path. Consequently, my home lost its power. There is nothing like a little loss of electricity to remind us of how dependent upon it we are. Sometimes, we are also reminded how thankful we should be for how tough the founding parents of our country were to be able to build the foundation of our great nation without even one little spark of the electric magic to help power their way. And a power outage may also remind us how miserable life would be if those crazy terrorists or any of the rogue nations we used to blather on about ever lit off an EMP – an Electromagnetic Pulse – bomb anywhere over our country and blew out our power grid. But anyway…
You can tell that good ol’ Ben Franklin, even though he supposedly discovered the stuff, didn’t have any electricity to power the lights of his home. Why wouldn’t someone want to go to bed early and rise early when there aren’t any freakin’ lights one in the house? Today, after the power went out, the sun set shortly thereafter; and, shortly thereafter that, I was out like a light, so to speak. I wouldn’t have been able to stay awake no matter what. There was nothing to do except watch the candle flicker, which, by the way, was rather entertaining for about twenty minutes. But it made me sleepy so by 8:00 pm, I was asleep.
But as soon as that power came back on around midnight and the house got its electric juice restored and began purring like a kitten getting its belly rubbed, I woke right up and couldn’t get back to sleep. I got out of bed, turned on all the lights, turned on the TV, turned on the AC even though it wasn’t hot, looked inside the fridge without knowing what I wanted to eat and pondered over my choices a little longer than I should have just because I now had the power to do so, and then went to my chair and fired up my laptop feeling like a 21st Century Man is supposed to feel—enlightened.
However, as I was typing away at this post, the electricity went out once again. And once again, my house became unnaturally silent. I’m typing only by the light of the laptop, which, according to the little battery icon in the tray, will only be available for nine more minutes so I better get this finished and published before it’s too late. Besides, without any electricity to charge me up, I’m once again beginning to feel sleepy. Hopefully, this time the electricity won’t come back on until around ten in the morning so I can get sleep uninterrupted and fully recharge my battery.
Maybe it’s just because I’m off work recovering from cancer and have more time to pay attention to current events, but it seems to me that insane violent crimes are happening almost daily. Just this week, a doctor at Johns Hopkins hospital was shot by the son of a patient. The son ended up also shooting the patient, his mother, and then himself. The week before that, there was the Discovery building hostage situation, and several weeks before that there was the mother who drowned her children. I could go on and on with all the insanity that has been happening in the past year or two but this post has already depressed me enough so I won’t.
Instinctively, I want to say that it is the bad economy and the stress that it has been inflicting on our nation as a whole that is responsible for all these insane violent crimes; however, after a quick search of the topic, I’ve found that, according to the FBI, violent crime has actually been decreasing, even during the economic crisis.
I’m no expert, but after thinking about it for a bit, it seems to me that violent crimes—murders, rapes, assaults—which are tragic enough, are not the same as these insane violent crimes—shooting a doctor and then your mother in a hospital, taking hostages because you hate people for killing the earth, drowning your children and then making it look like an accident, or dressing up as Santa Claus and going on a killing rampage—so maybe the FBI statistics don’t really apply here. Maybe, but I really don’t know.
What I do know is that as long as we have a significant portion of our population raised and socialized in violent, abusive, poverty-ridden environments, then we’re going to continue to have a portion of our population suffering from the violent crimes that are committed as a result of this environment and socialization. And as long as these violent crimes are isolated to just a portion of our population, then the majority of the population will, unfortunately, be able to easily turn a blind eye to most of it.
But when the entire population is suffering under economic stress, debt, ineffectual national leaders, divisive, vindictive politics, perpetual war, nuclear brinkmanship, excessive military buildup, constant threat of terrorism, and an increasing feeling of no hope of change for the better, like it is now, then we all are going to suffer from it, no one is going to be able to turn a blind eye toward it, and, if things don’t change soon, the entire population will eventually have a national nervous breakdown from it.
Perhaps all of these insane violent crimes that have been happening recently are the first cracks in our national psyche.
Warning: This is potentially a TMI post. Read at your own risk!
Kurt with hairBefore my cancer and all the chemo, I saw myself similar to how Ricky Bobby saw himself in the movie Talladega Nights: I’m just a big hairy American winning machine, you know. That was me. I was confident, happy, had a wonderful family, a great job, felt strong and in okay shape, and I had a thick mane of hair on my head and a decent coat of fur all over my body. I was no back shaver, mind you (not that there is anything wrong with those of my friends who feel the need to shave the back…you gotta do what you gotta do) but I definitely had some hair to be proud of. But all of that, especially the confidence, the being in shape, and the hair, changed after the chemo.
Now I know some of you are wondering—I know I was before I started getting the chemo, so I asked my nurse—does one lose ALL their hair from the chemo treatments? The answer I got was that it depends. It depends on the person, the type of chemo, and the amount of chemo received. I would just have to wait and see.
It turned out that during the first phase, things moved slowly hair loss-wise. It took several weeks before any hair on my head started falling out and a couple more weeks before my beard began thinning out. I never noticed the loss of any body hair. I will say, it was very unsettling when the hair on my head began falling out in earnest and I would wake up in the morning to see big piles of it all over my pillow and bed. Once that started happening, I went directly to the barber and had my head shaved.
Shaved headIt’s not as easy as you think to get your head shaved. When I went, my regular barber was crowded so, not wanting to have to sit around and explain to the regulars about my cancer, I went to another barber that I had only been to once before. It was empty so I went in. The barber was a female and after I sat down and explained that I wanted my head shaved, she almost seemed offended, but in a cheesy, middle-aged flirty kind of way. She gave me the third degree and wanted to know why I wanted my head shaved. Still in no mood to discuss my cancer, I just said something rather curt about me being sick of having such thick hair to mess with. She reluctantly began shaving it off, but as she did, she went on the whole time about how a guy should never shave off such a nice head of hair. (I have another story about my hair and my youngest son’s ill-fated attempt at trying to shave if off…but that’s for another time.)
I had a couple of weeks off between phase one and phase two treatments. During the time off, the hair on my head and face started growing back in rather quickly. But again, after a few weeks of the phase two chemo treatments, both head and facial hair began thinning out. Again, I did not notice the loss of any body hair. This time, because the hair on my head was so short, I was able to shave it off myself.
Before the transplantDuring the first two phases, while I did lose a lot of hair, I never lost all of it on either my head or face. But all that changed after I received the large doses of chemo in preparation for my bone marrow transplant. About two weeks after the treatment, hair everywhere began falling out. And by everywhere, I mean everywhere. After about a month, the only hair I had left on my body was my eyebrows and my eyelashes. My body was smooth as a newborn baby. I won’t go too much into details, but I will say, things feel a lot different without hair in the places where you’ve been used to having it. I was left feeling very incomplete and somewhat insecure. I didn’t like it at all.
But now, finally, it’s all coming back and I’m beginning to feel much more like my old self. And by old, I mean much older. As you can see, even though I looked older than my age before, this whole cancer ordeal has aged me even more. And even though I’ll still be completely gray on top, I’ll be glad to have it back and I promise not to complain when it once again gets too long and too thick and too hot on my head. And I won’t, in frustration, ask my son to shave it off (again, we’ll leave that story for another day). Coming back!
Back in May of this year, the Department of Defense put up an online inbox where servicemembers and their family can anonymously post what they feel the impact of repealing the Don’t Ask Don’t Tell policy would have on the military. The survey closed on August 30. I wonder how it went.
Seeing that the Secretary of Defense and the Joint Chiefs of staff have publicly endorsed President Obama’s plan to repeal the DADT policy, I also wonder how it will play out for them come December 1 if the results of the survey strongly suggest that most servicemembers and their families feel that repealing the policy will have a negative impact on the military.
Kurt's nurse suited up and prepared to administer his chemotherapy
It seems to me that the word “chemotherapy” is one of those rare words that can instantly conjure up fear and images of pain and suffering, similar to words like “Holocaust” and “September Eleventh.” Perhaps those comparisons are not exactly appropriate (and bordering on bad taste), but my point is, just hearing the word chemotherapy tends to scares us.
And for good reason, too. Chances are, we know someone close to us, maybe a loved one or a friend, who got cancer and who had to receive rounds of chemotherapy. And from them, we heard firsthand how tough it was on the body. We heard about the nausea and vomiting, we heard about how it attacks the intestinal tracks and causes mucositis, we heard about their inability to eat and the loss of weight, we heard about the lightheadedness and dizzy spells, and we heard about the hair loss.
But chances also are, even though we know the word and are familiar with all of the effects associated with it, we really don’t know what it is. Now, I’m not about to try to cover the many different forms of chemotherapy treatments that are available, you can do a quick search and find out all about them if you’re really interested, but I do think it’s interesting that one word can have such an impact on our collective psyche without us really knowing much about it.
One thing I can tell you about chemotherapy, the stuff is toxic. Take a look at the picture of my nurse at the top of this post. She has to take special precautions to ensure that she doesn’t come in contact with the chemotherapy. She has to wear a mask, a disposable suit that wraps around and completely covers her clothing, and special gloves that go over the standard gloves she wears. What you don’t see in the picture is that the nurses also have a special hat that has a clear guard to protect their neck and face. It looks similar to what a spot welder would wear. And then, after she is completely protected, she pumps that toxic junk right into me.
From my experience, it seems that whenever chemotherapy is discussed, we tend to focus on all the negativity associated with it–just like I’ve been doing in this post–and barely focus at all on its most important quality: CHEMOTHERAPY SAVES LIVES! It saved my life. And, like a miracle, it’s saving countless of other lives every single day. We all should give thanks to God for it.
At the beginning of any new journey, maybe it’s starting with a new company, going back to college, or signing up for fitness classes at the local gym, it seems that you can easily identify those who are just starting out. Like you, they are the ones who are just learning the ropes of the new system. They don’t know exactly what to do, where to go, or how to get there. Like you, they just look new. Over time, whether intended or not, a bond will form between you and the group of new travelers and you will begin to identify yourselves as a sort of class. Maybe you will become friends with some of the people from your class or maybe you won’t, but the chances are you will always feel a special kinship with those who traveled on your journey with you.
My cancer journey was no different. Practically from the moment of my diagnosis, I began to notice others who had also just begun on their cancer journey. New cancer patients are especially easy to identify: they are the ones who have a constant stunned look of disbelief on their faces; they are the ones who are irritable, stressed, and anxious, not just from recently having learned about their disease, but mostly from the side effects of the steroids and other new drugs they had just started taking; and they are the ones who still have their hair.
After diagnosis, I was immediately admitted to the hospital for the first two weeks to begin my initial phase of chemotherapy and medications. From time to time I would see other new cancer patients as either I or they walked laps around the ward; or, I would see them pass by my door on their way to the little kitchenette for the always available ice cream or cup of noodles. Sometimes we would wave or nod our masked heads at each other. Oftentimes, we would just simply shuffle by each other without any acknowledgement.
After I was discharged from the cancer ward, I was admitted to the Inpatient/Outpatient Clinic. At IPOP, new cancer patients usually have appointments every day. Every day, my wife—my caregiver, my inspiration, and my guiding light—would pack me up and drive me to the hospital. The drive could take anywhere from 45 minutes to an hour and a half, depending on Baltimore traffic. When I got to the hospital, I would reluctantly don my mask, reluctantly disinfect my hands, reluctantly enter the clinic, sit down, pull my ball cap down tight over my freshly shaved head, and glumly wait to be called by the nurse. Meanwhile, my wife, always positive, always cheerful, would sign in for me in the registry, make herself a cup of coffee, grab a magazine, and then sit beside me and try to cheer me up. Other familiar masked faces would also be there waiting with their caregivers.
Soon my wife became friends with several of the other caregivers and, through her reports, I would be able to track the progress of the other cancer patients from my class. It helped me to hear about them from my wife. Knowing that others are on a similar journey as yours, that others are just as confused, just as sick, just as scared as you are, provides a certain level of comfort and a sort of release. I was able to let go many of my fears and better accept my condition because I learned that nothing that I was going through was unique just to me.
Unfortunately, there are many, too many, cancer patients in my class. And even though I was familiar with all of them and drew strength from their silent encouragement and solidarity, I only came to personally know a few of them by name. And of those, I only know the current fate of two, which is too bad because I often think about all of those faces who I had come to know so well and wonder how they are doing now. I try not to wonder who didn’t make it.
Next year my cancer class will graduate. Sometime next year, we will meet with our oncologist and we will be released from his or her care. Our disability insurance will stop and we will hesitantly and apprehensively return to work. After graduation, we will be free and encouraged to begin other new and exciting journeys, which is why graduations are often called commencement ceremonies. And when our new journeys do commence, we will look around and see that there are others who are also just starting the journey, too. And, while we will hope that we never have to travel down the same road as we did on the journey we just ended, we will know that we will all be better travelers for it.
Harvey PekarI have been neck-high into the medical establishment since my leukemia diagnosis in November 2009. Consequently, while I do not consider myself an expert of the establishment by any stretch of the imagination, I do believe that I am far too acutely aware of it. But, I guess that is to be expected from someone as critically dependent upon it as I am.
In addition to my practical experiences with hospitals and doctors and examinations and extremely long needles, I have also spent much time reading about the establishment, especially that aspect of it which relates to the treatments of leukemia and chronic graft versus host disease (cGVHD) of the lungs.
Most of my medical-related reading has been as research conducted on the internet.
Thank god for the internet. I am one of those annoying types who like to be knowledgeable just enough about something to make me, if not dangerous (which it just may), then certainly annoying.
I’ve come to find out over the past three years that doctors are a lot of fun to annoy.
While there are probably more books about cancer out there stalking, I mean, stocking the shelves than there are cancerous cells, I don’t recall ever reading any of them.
I don’t know why. Maybe because they all seemed too sanitary or too personal or too impersonal or too whiney or too who knows what.
I didn’t so I just left them all alone; that is, until I learned that the legendary Harvey Pekar had his own version of a cancer story to tell.
Pekar, who died recently, is famous for his graphic novel series AMERICAN SPLENDOR, in which he chronicles his life as a VA Hospital file clerk in Cleveland, Ohio. It doesn’t sound like much to work with — Cleveland, file clerk, VA Hospital — but somehow it has endured through the years and was even turned into a flick starring the always spot-on Paul Giamatti as Pekar.
In 1990, Pekar was diagnosed with and treated for Non-Hodgkins Lymphoma. Four years after surviving through that experience, he collaborated with his wife Joyce Brabner to publish an AMERICAN SPLENDOR-like graphic novel called OUR CANCER YEAR.
OUR CANCER YEAR is a gritty, honest and, sometimes, horrific portrayal of what life was like for Pekar and his wife while battling the disease.
But it is about more than just his experience with cancer. Pekar’s wife is also a comic book writer who focuses her work on peace projects. Through her efforts, we are provided side story glimpses about Operation Desert Shield and her work with teenage peace activists. And, because they had recently purchased a home at the time of his diagnosis, we also have the added stress that comes with buying a home on top of everything else that is happening to them.
I found the book interesting because Pekar really was able to bring out the hope and heartache and stress and pain that one, and one’s loved ones, must endure throughout the entire cancer experience, from first finding out about the disease, to all the damage that the chemotherapy treatment does to the body, to the overwhelming toll it takes on those closest to the cancer patient trying to care for him. It was also interesting to me to compare how he managed to cope with the disease versus how I tried to manage.
Let’s just say he is a glass half empty kind of guy. While I typically am too, I never felt as down about the disease as he apparently did.
While Pekar and I had many similar experiences battling our respective cancers, we also had many differences. One of the most significant differences was a painful experience that he had to go through that I never did (at least not yet–knock on wood). Pekar contracted Herpes Zoster, also known as shingles. For some reason, Shingles are a big threat to chemotherapy patients. Thankfully, my doctors were very aggressive about it and put me on an antiviral drug called Valtrex (Valaciclovir) as a preventative measure for at least a year, and which I will probably take for the rest of my life. Pekar also suffered much worse hallucinations and anxiety than I did as an effect from all the drugs cancer patients typically have to take.
While most of what you need to know about the medical establishment in general and cancer in particular can be found on the internet, some things can’t. In my perspective, if you really want to get telling insight into the hardships that come with having cancer you either need to experience it yourself first-hand, which I emphatically do not recommend, or you need to experience it in a less graphic but completely realistic and touching way, like reading Pekar’s graphic novel OUR CANCER YEAR.
OUR CANCER YEAR is a gritty, honest and, sometimes, horrific portrayal of what life was like for Pekar and his wife while battling the disease.