Elder daughter scores The Ellen Show’s loot

Elder daughter Jackie, a graduate of NYU and the UC Irvine Law School’s inaugural class, was lucky enough to score an audience seat for the Mother’s Day edition of The Ellen DeGeneres Show.

She’s pregnant, you see, which was the primary requirement that also scored her a whole bundle of loot just for showing up.

She also scored some camera time, becoming the first audience member picked for a Q&A session with DeGeneres and pal Bethenney Frankel. The whole episode is a classic example of what every dad loves to hear a daughter discuss on nationwide television. . .

There’s a certain irony in all this, in that Jackie started college as an acting major before switching to anthropology as an NYU undergrad. But it’s only been in the last four weeks she got her breakthrough into national media, first on NBC News live from Boston talking about her experiences of the Marathon Day bombings followed by her appearance with Ellen.

Chemo Chronicles: It’s been a long, long ride

Our last chemo session was three weeks ago tomorrow, but we’re only now finally starting to come back from what was the final and roughest of our four courses of three-treatment regimes.

And the irony is, it’s only been in the last ten days or so that the hair has really been falling out, so much so that we’re essentially bald on top, whilst our moustache has lost about two-thirds of its volume, as you can see. . .

6 May 2013, Panasonic DMZ-ZS19, ISO 400, 4.3 mm, 1/40 sec, f3.3

But, to borrow a phrase from a favorite film, The Dude abides.

Our of the last 12 days or so, we’ve only felt human on two days, but we finally have the anti-nausea regime down pat, and since the flow of toxic chemicals through our veins has ceased, we actually look forward to starting to recover some of our energy.

Hopefully we’ll get back to posting more regularly as well.

We learned something in our last oncologist visit visit: Most folks don’t finish their full chemo regimen. At some point, the body crashes under the assault and the treatments are stopped. We made it all the way through and the doc says that while me may feel like hell, we’re actually pretty strong. Nice to know, but it doesn’t really help when you’re wracked by the dry heaves, having thrown up everything, right down to the bile.

So bare as our cranium may be, we’re on the way back. Or so we’re told.

For previous entries in the saga, see here.

The Boston bombings struck close to home

If you haven’t yet heard, a pair of bombs at the Boylston Street finish line for the Boston Marathon have resulted in massive casualties.

The news sent us to the phone, because among those present on Boylston Street today were our regnant elder daughter, Jackie, her spouse, and his mother, who had run the race.

Jackie observed that had her mother-in-law finished a few minutes later, they would’ve been at or near where the blasts occurred  rather than having passed the sites  a few minutes before.

UPDATE: She was interviewed about her expieriences by NBC News’s Matt Lauer. See it here.

Chemo Chronicles: It’s been a really bumpy ride

It’s been a week since our last post, all because of our third Double Whammy session 5 March was followed by a radical drop in our blood hemoglobin levels, leaving us feeling, well, utterly devastated and incapable of focusing our thoughts to the degree required by coherent writing.

A day after the session, whilst undergoing a new regimen of IV fluid replacement [two liters for each of three consecutive four-hour daily sessions] tests revealed the blood crisis, and on the following day, last Friday, two pints of red blood cells were added to the fluids.

We felt better for a day. But just a day. That old cisplatin, the heaviest gun in our chemo regimen, knocks us on our ass every time, with impacts greater after each successive round.

By yesterday, when it came time for our gemcitabine-only chemo session, the hemoglobin was still well above the red line minimum, while new anti-nausea medications were added to the regime, along with more bowel-stimulating meds to counteract the effects of the anti-nausea drugs and two-and-a-half liters of more saline solution to keep the fluids up, another anti-constipation measure.

Oh, and just for the record, the constipation increases the nausea. . .

So that’s the way it rolls here in ChemoLand, where first surgery [removing bladder and prostate], then chemical assault, have been deployed against that aggressive ["high grade" in oncology-speak] and relatively rare micropapillary carcinoma discovered last October after a bit of blood appeared amongst the urine in the toilet bowl,

The irony, of course, is that we didn’t experience the slightest pain until we were catheterized for the first look inside the bladder, where the camera spotted an ominous form and a remote-controlled blade sliced off the hunk of growth that would firm the worst.

Then came the surgery, five hours or so, including the temporary emplacement of another catheter, with the pain partly abated by a Fentanyl spinal bloc that spared us much of the pain.

We were sent home with a whole raft of Percocets after a short but disastrous nursing home stay. We took none, having discovered that our level of pain tolerance, previously low, had risen considerably.

But then, just as we were finally recovering from the surgery, came the chemo. . .all because that nasty little cancer had escaped to one of the twenty lymph nodes taken during the surgery.

Dispelling a rumor

We’re somewhat bemused by the words we hear a lot these days, wherein people say they’re confident I’ll beat this thing because we’re so strong.

Other words we’ve heard are “courageous” and “brave.”

Our initial response was self-deprecating, the sort of thing expected of someone raised in a Calvinist household in a small Kansas farm town on the very first year of the Baby Boom.

We came to see that we are, in a peculiar way, strong. “You’re a pig-headed little Dutchman,” Dad used to say in frustration. So if strength equates to stubbornness, that’s probably true. But it’s also not a matter of choice. Nor is it always pleasant for those nearest and dearest [as when we walked away in anger from Sacramento Bee after they killed stories about political corruption in California, leaving our then-spouse and new mother of two to play wage-earner.]

Sure, we fought for the stories because we felt they were important enough for the public to know. But mostly we fought because we had no other choice. It was, quite simply, in our nature to do nothing else but fight, consequences be damned.

But courage and bravery — really?

We’re thought about the labels as they apply to our current, carcinomous episode, and we reject them.

To our mind, courage and bravery imply an element of volition, a choice. But more that that, they describe actions taken on behalf of others. Actions embodying the very thing Ayn Rand so vehemently despised, altruism.

Heroes, to us, are those who risk all on behalf of others. Our battle with cancer is strictly personal, waged on our own behalf. We just that pig-headed little Dutchman a few years on. There’s no volition involved. It’s just what we do.

A reporter who covered the White House back when Lyndon Johnson ruled the roost once told me that First Spouse Lady Bird Johnson once told him “Politicians should be born foundlings and die bachelors.” Perhaps that’s true of heroes as well.

Chemo Chronicles: And that’s the way it is

First, a message seeming tailored just for esnl — and anyone else undergoing cisplatin chemotherapy:

We had our second Double Whammy session with the peculiarly nasty cisplatin and the less nasty gemcitabine last Tuesday [5 February], and it was a helluva lot worse than our first, with the worst side effects starting a day sooner and ending two days later than our first session.

We back for the first of two gemcitabine-only sessions yesterday [12 February], where we learned that cisplatin’s side effects tend to worsen with each new round.

Marty Robbins seems to be singing about our experience in a song we’ve loved since we first heard it in a trailer in Alamosa, Colorado, so many decades ago:

When the worst of its upon us, another Country song comes to mind.

From Hank Williams and The Drifting Cowboys:

But when the funk lifts, we’re reminded of another Country classic, from Bob Wills & The Texas Playboys:

We’ve got two more cisplatin and gemcitabine Double Whammy sessions coming up, and five more gemcitabine-only sessions.

After that, it’s periodic checkups for any recurrence of that nasty and very aggressive micropapillary carcinoma that cost us our bladder and spread to at least one lymph node. Our other cancer, adenoma of the prostate, hadn’t metastcized, and was resolved with the organ’s removal at the smae time the bladder went.

But what the hell. Let’s close on an upbeat tune, another Bob Wills classic recorded in 1936:

You can find all our previous chemo posts here.

Godfather Chronicles: A much-belated confession

One of the most infamous paragraphs in the history of modern investigative journalism was written by a member of the UC Berkeley journalism faculty, repudiating his own reporting about on of America’s most prominent gangsters.

Here’s what Lowell Bergman and his colleague wrote to ease themselves out of a multi-million-dollar lawsuit filed by, among others, Morris Barney Dalitz, the syndicate thug who ran the mob’s skimming operation in Las Vegas back in the days esnl was working his first daily newspaper job in Sin City:

“We feel it right to acknowledge the positive information received about you [Dalitz] in recent years and, accordingly, to express any regret for negative implication or unwarranted harm that you believe may have befallen you as a result of the Penthouse article.”

The article, “La Costa: The Hundred-Million-Dollar Resort with Criminal Clientele,” appeared in the March 1975 issue of Penthouse, and focused on the mob’s involvement in a posh golfing resort in North San Diego County, a few miles from Oceanside, where we joined the staff of the late Blade-Tribune in 1967, shortly after leaving the Las Vegas Review-Journal.

Our job had us covering Carlsbad, the adjacent town and closet to La Costa [the town’s city manager would soon take a posh job at the mob watering hole]. When a story took us to the resort, we found ourselves amazed when we looked at the membership board: Familiar names included Moe Dalitz [previously, and here], Frank Sinatra, Carl Cohen [the Sands casino manager who famously knocked out some of Sinatra’s teeth after the drunken crooner drove a golf cart through one of the hotel’s plate glass windows], and Don W. Reynolds, the publisher of the Review-Journal. For a fresh Vegas emigre, it felt like coming home.

We remember telling our managing editor the next day, “That La Costa looks like quite a place.”

We learned about the Penthouse story when a spotted an ad for it on the side of a bus in Los Angeles, where we had just started work for the Southern California Visitors Council — a gig we worked for a year before returning the ink-stained wretch trade at the late and much-lamented Santa Monica Evening Outlook.

We found the story of the resort’s financing by the mob-controlled Teamsters Central States Pension Fund fascinating, making sense of that membership board we’d seen seven years before.

But resort owners Merv Adelson, Irwin Molasky, Dalitz, and Allard Roen filed that $522 million lawsuit, and when push came to shove, the journalists folded, followed by Penthouse, with apologies accepted in exchange for each side bearing its own legal costs.

From the magazine’s 1985 skinback [a journalism term for what Kansas folks used to call “eating crow”], a declaration that Penthouse

did not mean to imply nor did it intend for its readers to believe that Messrs. Adelson and Molasky are or were members of organized crime or criminals. In addition, Penthouse acknowledges that all of the individual plaintiffs, including Messrs. Dalitz and Roen, have been extremely active in commendable civic and philanthropic activities which have earned them recognition from many estimable people. Furthermore Penthouse acknowledges that among plaintiffs’ successful business activities is the La Costa resort itself, one of the outstanding resort complexes of the world.

But now, 28 years after the settlement, comes conclusive proof that the journalists were right.

Here’s a telling quote from “Remembrance of Wings Past,” a remarkable profile of Merv Adelson by  Bryan Burrough in the March edition of Vanity Fair:

The Rancho La Costa resort opened its doors to the public in 1965. From the outset Adelson could tell his dreams of escaping the Mafia had been dashed. “The first guests, they were all Teamsters!” he exclaims. And then Detroit and Chicago Mob bosses, all the way up to Meyer Lansky himself. “There were hundreds of them!” Adelson adds. “I couldn’t get rid of them! The Teamsters treated it like their country club. It got a real reputation. I didn’t like it at all. But I couldn’t stop it. We owed them money! What could I do?” His children were soon being teased with the same taunts they had heard in Las Vegas. He was trapped. A very rich trap, but a trap nevertheless.

Lansky was the mob’s money wizard, portrayed as “Hyman Roth” by Lee Strassberg in The Godfather, Part II, a man who got his start partnering with Bugsy Siegel [“Moe Green”] and Charlie “Lucky” Luciano:

Adelson is rather disingenuous in his interviews, claiming he had no idea who he’d gotten in bed with — hard to believe of anyone circulating in his circles in the Sin City of the 1950s and 1960s. Indeed, he claims, only with the publication of The Green Felt Jungle, a 1963 bestseller by Ed Reid and Ovid Demaris did he realize just who he’d partnered with in his Sin City business dealings.

The profile paints a picture of a down on his luck octogenarian, living in a Santa Monica apartment no larger than the walk-in closets of his salad days dwellings.

So Bergman’s skinback was a farce, and the Penthouse article he disavowed was right. It didn’t hurt Bergman’s career, since he went on to produce for 60 Minutes, then found himself a nice nest at UC Berkeley’s journalism school.

Somewhere in hell, Moe Dalitz must be laughing his boney ass off.

Chemo Chronicles: The end of Round One

We started chemo three weeks ago because the nasty little cancer that cost us our bladder [and prostate] back in November has spread to the lymph system, colonizing one of the twenty nodes they took along with the rest of our innards.

Our surgeon and our oncologist both give us good odds with the chemo, with only a one in five chance of a malignant resurgence with the chemo, compared to even odds or worse without it.

The regime consists of three weekly sessions, followed by one week off. Then retreat three more times.

The first session is the killer, a mix of two drugs. There’s an initial dose of gemcitabine hydrochloride followed with hefty infusion of cisplatin. It’s the latter drug that carries the punch in the form of three days of a deep-seated nausea, requiring another one-two chemical treatment. [For more, see this earlier post.]

The next two sessions are gemcitabine hydrochloride-only, and the worst side effect seems to be the burning session in the vein near the injection site.

As noted in our last post, the cisplatin seems to have triggered a nine-day siege of constipation, ending with a trip to the emergency room.

Our final gemcitabine hydrochloride session Tuesday went by almost without a hitch, and we’re not feeling any nausea the day after, so we may be in for a realtively pleasant two-week break before the next double whammy.

When we say “almost,” we mean some worrisome results from our last blood and urine tests led the oncologist to halve the dose of chemo.

Our platelet count was less two-thirds of the therapeutic minimum [64 versus 100, with a normal range of 140-400], and our urine showed elevated numbers for hemoglobin, protein, urobilinogen, and leucocyte esterase. But it’s the platelet count they want to see up before another double whammy.

We’re just glad we’ve got a two-week break.

Stay tuned.

The Chemo Chronicles: Nausea and all that

Preface: What follows is a rambling post, composed over three days for reasons that will soon become apparent.

There’s a certain irony in the course of events since I discovered blood in my urine last September: None of the pain and other sundry inconveniences since the diagnosis were produced by the cancer itself.

The blood in the urine brought no physical discomfort, only anxiety. The diagnosis followed catheter surgery, which is no picnic once the anesthesia wears off, and you’re uncomfortably reminded of it every time you pee.

The hope was that the cancer was contained. If so, no radical surgery, just further catheter exams every few months for a couple of years.

But the initial surgery merely delivered the bad news: The cancer was big and and the bladder had to go, and with it, the prostate [which turned out to have a bit of cancer of another sort, as the post-op biopsy revealed].

The good news: No more painful pees.

The bad news: No more pees. And until you can’t pee any more, you have no idea how much the satisfaction the simple eliminatory act brings.

After the radical surgery in late November, recovery was painful, but we were off the percocet two days after we left the hospital.

Adjusting to a urostemy proved a challenge, a section of intestine snipped out and used to drain urine from the ureters, which empty into the snipped-out gut, which then opens onto the belly to the right of the navel through a bright pink stoma, the small segment of intestine through which the urine drains out into a self-adhesive plastic bag.

Adapting to the bag made for a few uncomfortably wet nights until we mastered the art of affixing the bag [which includes keeping a square of belly shaved].

But that took only a couple of weeks.

Chemo, however, is something else.

During our first session Tuesday, we experienced some discomfort in the form of a slight burning sensation in the veins of our left arm, where the needle bled a flood of chemistry into our bodies to target fast-growing cells, of which the potential cancer tissue is only one form [skin and intestinal cells, the tissue of the mouth, and, of course, hair, to name a few].

By evening, we were tired and slightly groggy.

Wednesday morning, well before dawn, came shivers and hiccups, accompanied by a sense that our stomach might just toss up anything we threw down it.

We took our anti-nausea chemical cocktail mix of ondansetron and dexamethasone [AKA decadron, a steroid] and went back to sleep. By late afternoon, we felt well enough to grab a glass of porter and a pizza with friends.

We went to bed early, then woke up very early Wednesday, feeling like we’d been worked over by Mike Tyson the night before.

There’s nausea, and then there’s nausea. The kind that was grabbing at every shred of our predawn awareness was like none we’d ever felt before. It wasn’t the drank-too-much-the-night-before sort, the kind that leaves you feeling when you first stand up that you’re walking on the deck of a storm-tossed ship.

No, this was something else entirely, a feeling that our viscera had sustained repeated powerful blows. No dizziness, no immediate sense of the need to vomit. Just plain old misery.

We downed the pills, the first of two days of double doses prescribed on the days after we were infused with cisplatin, the more noxious of our two chemo compounds [more on the regimen here].

We read abed for two or three hours [John D. Macdonald, Carl Hiassen, and Raymond Chandler have been trusty companions during our little adventure with the Big C], then grabbed some more sleep.

We did manage to do a little blogging Thursday, but none Friday, which was about as bad viscerally. We spent most of the day in bed, relieved by a Transatlantic phone call and a visit from a friend, who brought much-needed groceries.

We were up early again today, and looked over the first part of this post, which had been banged out in dribs and drabs over the past two days and decided — what the hell — we’ll go with it.

One thing I’ve learned for certain: Cisplatin will never catch on as a drug of abuse.

First chemo, the nauseous day after

While we left Tuesday’s double whammy chemo session feeling merely a bit weak, it’s the second day that we’re starting to feel the effects from pumping hefty doses of a pair of toxic chemicals through our veins.

We feel, to quote an old cowboy friend from long ago, that we’ve “been rid hard and put away wet.”

It began with shivvers when we woke up at four, and they passed after we read for an hour or so. Then, when we awakened again three hours later, hiccups came as we lay abed contemplating the day. A half hour later came the nausea, mild but disorienting.

We’ve just popped the requisite pills, ondansetron [a seortonin antagonist] to combat the nausea and dexamethasone [AKA decadron, a steroid] to augment the anti-nausea effects of ondansetron and stimulate appetite. Oddly, one of dexamethasone’s side effects when not used in this combination is nausea.

We double up on the steroid tomorrow and Wednesday, then discontinue until four weeks from now when we have our second double whammy treatment. The drug isn’t used in connection with our next two weekly sessions, which consist only of gemcitabine hydrochloride.

We get a one week break, then start again with the same cycle, which we’ll undergo a total of four times.

The whole cancer experience, which began the September morning we saw blood in our urine and continued through two surgeries, a nightmare stay in a nursing home, and then the latest chemical adventure, has been truly humbling for one main reason: We have discovered that we are rich in the only thing in life that really matters friends.

I won’t name them without asking their permission, but I have been especially touched and deeply humbled by the constant support of my friends here in Berkeley. I was visited daily in the hospital after my surgery as well as in the nursing home by people I’d grown to respect during my days working at the Berkeley Daily Planet. A former newspaper colleague has been my chauffeur to surgeries and my chemo session.

Then there are my distant friends, including many colleagues from newspapers where I’ve worked, some still extant. And there is the old and fondly remembered lover. And, always, Moussequetaire in Paris, with calls and messages.

Family too has been a source of great solace. My ex and our two daughters came to Berkeley to clean house while I was in surgery, and I returned to a home spotless and furnished with both a new bed and a new sofa.

And then there are you, the readers, with your own notes of encouragement and offers of help. I am simply awed.

Whatever the outcome of our current ordeal, our life is much the richer for it, and for that we are deeply, deeply, grateful.

Chemo Day One: A self-portrait in light, shadow

8 January 2013, Nikon D300, ISO 320, 18 mm, 1/125 sec, f3.5

Today was the first of what will be an even dozen chemotherapy sessions, a toxic battle to contain that aggressive ““high grade metastatic micropapillary urothelial carcinoma” that cost us our bladder, with the prostate thrown in for luck.

We learned something new at the start of the session in the pleasantly appointed chemotherapy floor at Kaiser Oakland, just across Broadway from the old hospital building.

The day began with a bit of a shock. We learned that instead of the three sessions we thought would comprise our treatment, there will be four three-session cycles [with a week interval of no chemo in between each cycle], for a four-month regime.

Each cycle will begine with a session like today’s, beginning with a cup full of steroid [decadron] and anti-nausea [] tablets, followed by the installation of the intravenous line, with the first potion pumped through the veins being another anti-nausea agent, followed by a hefty dose of gemcitabine hydrochloride along with a separate bag of IV saline solution, then followed up with two-hour infusion of cisplatin accompanied by another separate bag of saline.

Next Tuesday will be a shorter session with only the gemcitabine hydrochloride, followed by another identical session a week later. Then comes the week off, followed by another double whammy to start the next cycle.

We’re feeling a bit disoriented and a bit weak. No nausea yet, though we suspect it’s coming later this evening.

The Kaiser nurses were excellent, the setting as pleasant as reasonably possible. There are individual TVs. But we were blessed by the presence of a good friend throughout the whole five-hour session, which really helped.

It’s a fascinating business. The chemo was called for by a biopsy following of November radical surgery to remove two organs we’d learned to know and love [God, how we miss the joy of taking a good piss. . .of what our old man called “shaking the dew from my lily.”]

When the chopped the two organs, they also scooped up 20 associated lymph nodes, one of which had been colonized by that nasty, aggressive cancer. Finding it on node meant a fifty/fifty chance it had also spread elsewhere. No radiation because where to target the beams since you’re dealing with probabilities and not specific sites of spread?

So the adventure has begun.

We’ll keep you posted.

Slow blogging ahead: Off to chemo

Depending how we feel afterwards we may [or may not] post about the session later today. If not then, soon.

Twas the night before chemo[therapy]

Celebrating the evening before, as well as our soon to be temporarily departing  hair, and taken by a friend during a beer and pizza session with two good friends at Jupiter on Shattuck Avenue in Berkeley. Tomorrow, Tuesday, we undergo our first chemotherapy session.

7 January 2013, Nikon D300, ISO 6400, 105 mm, 1/8 sec, f5.3

The Larsens, a family of tall, homely Danes

Our maternal grandfather, Emanuel [upper row, second from left], is perhaps the best-looking of the brothers, the offspring of two Danish immigrants. Grandfather Larsen stood over six feet, and with his blond hair and blue eyes, he once considered joining British Queen Victoria’s personal guards regiment. With his attitudes towards folks of other races, he would’ve been a good candidate for Hitler’s Liebstandarte, which was also composed of blondes standing six feet and over. One of his more stunning lines: “Swedes are nothin’ but niggers turned inside out.”

The only memory we have of him is of his heavily rouged face inside his coffin, which we glimpsed only briefly as we were lifted up by our father.

Compare the difference with this 1897 portrait today’s causal shots. Getting a family portrait in a photographer’s studio before the turn of the last century was an ordeal, requiring the best clothes and the most formal expression.

We only recall one of the women, by then much withered by age. Aunt Maggie would give us our beloved cat, Mickey Cornhusker [because she lived in Nebraska]. We’re not sure just where she is in the picture. Click on the image to enlarge.

The vanished joys of the dead tree newsroom

I blame the downfall of the newsroom in part on a movie, Alan J. Pakula’s 1976 blockbuster All the President’s Men.

Back in 2001, director Steven Soderbergh told Rick Lyman of the New York Times:

“This movie just has the perfect balance,” Mr. Soderbergh said. ”The perfect balance between all of the elements. Sometimes, if you’re lucky, you get that, and sometimes you just don’t. You are always hoping for that alchemy to occur where everything in the movie is lifted up, because everything and everyone is working at the highest level. You hope for it, and you work for it, and sometimes you get it. And this is just one of those movies.”

Worst of all, it made reporters into reputable folks, played by Hollywood icons Robert Redford and Dustin Hoffman. Earlier cinematic portrayals of ink-stained wretches had come either from earthier actors like Bogart and William Holden. And when Cary Grant played one in His Girl Friday, the character verged on the downright sleazy.

But Redford and Hoffman played Woodward and Bernstein like folk heroes, mythological characters out of Greek drama, slaying a demonic president with the help of his own hubris.

Back when we first entered the newspaper game [9 November 1964], the craft was peopled by folks with foibles and eccentricities.

After all, as our dear departed mother reminded us on numerous occasions, “Why would somebody with the smarts to be a doctor or a lawyer work at a job that pays peanuts?”

Indeed.

My answer was always some variant of “Because it’s what I was born to do, dammit.”

And it was.

For lots of folks back then, journalism was a true calling, something discovered on the road to somewhere else, a lifelong addiction acquired in an instant.

And it was also, as a Sacramento Bee colleague once quipped, “The most fun you can have out of bed,” adding a suitably lascivious grin.

In what other line of work could a seventeen-year-old kid pick up a phone, identify himself and his affiliation, and be talking with a governor a few minutes later? And in what other line of work could a college dropout be tasked with asking questions and writing stories that could bring down politicians, get civil servants fired, or provoke massive eight-figure lawsuits?

Now add to the equation a reality of those long gone days, the existence of real competition between newspapers, papers owned, as often as not, by human persons rather than the corporate sort.

The existence of competition meant that a story ignored by one paper would be

Getting ready for the chemo regimen

We spent a couple of hours today getting prepped for our upcoming chemotherapy sessions, the next round in the battle against the insidious little invader that cost us our bladder and prostate.

Starting bright and early Tuesday, we’ll be spending five or six hours hooked up to an intravenous line that will pump us full of a chemical cocktail designed to interfere with the cellular division of what’s bizarrely known as a “high grade metastatic micropapillary urothelial carcinoma.” It’s perhaps the first time we’ve encountered something called “high grade” that isn’t desirable. [The second breed of cancer they found, adenocarcinoma, was considered irrelevant since it hadn’t escaped from the dearly departed prostate.]

We’ll be partaking of a two-chemical mixture, featuring cisplatin and gemcitabine hydrochloride, with the former being the kick in the ass as far as nausea goes. Two more sessions will follow with only the latter compound, and thus without the urge to purge.

Possible side effects include fever nausea, aches, mouth sores, insomnia, diarrhea and or constipation, loss of feeling in the extremities, high frequency hearing loss, and kidney damage [to name a few] as well as the almost inevitable hair loss.

Considering that the alternative is a very strong possibility that a very aggressive cancer will pop up elsewhere in the old bod, chemo seems the lesser of two evils. The surgeon says that without it, he gives even odds on a recurrence [and with a glum prognosis], compared to a twenty percent chance of recurrence with the chemo.

So what the hell. We’re already missing some key body parts, so why not the hair, too? Besides, unlike the bladder or prostate, it’ll grow back.

So come Tuesday morning, we’ll pack up a few good books and maybe a flick or two to play on our laptop and embark on life’s latest adventure.

Portrait of a pre-blogger, shot circa 1978

A grab shot, taken by old friend Don Douglas with a vintage Nikon, inside a reconstructed Native America pit house in Mendocino County. The available light was streaming in through a hole in the roof. We still have [and wear] both the Stetson and the Pendleton shirt. We can’t say as much about hair or teeth.

In which we learn of a coming change in status

Yep, there’s a grandkid on the way, elder daughter Jacqueline informed us today. Here we celebrate the moment during a visit to Moe’s Books on Telegraph Avenue.

26 December 2012, Nikon D300, ISO 640, 22 mm, 1/60 sec, f3.8

A good writer surrenders to Hollywood

Once upon a time, Nicholas Pileggi was a journalist, a commendable craftsman of workmanlike stories. Then he wrote an exceptional book about organized crime, Wiseguy, that he later scripted as a film, Goodfellas.

A second book, Casino: Love and Honor in Las Vegas, became another hit film, Casino, starring two of the leads from his earlier hit, Robert De Niro and Joe Pesci.

But somewhere along the line, he succumbed to the Hollywood temptation, which we know from personal experience can be quite powerful. We didn’t succumb, and it cost us dearly. But that’s the subject for another post.

The final proof of Pileggi’s downfall into the merely mercenary is a television series about a topic we know well, Las Vegas in the 1960s.

Pileggi knows Vegas, as his second book proved, which leaves us all the more dumbfounded at his latest venture, Vegas, a CBS series starring Dennis Quaid, Michael Chiklis, and Carrie-Anne Moss.

Quaid plays a character we encountered on numerous occasions during our first daily reporting job, beginning early in 1966, when we hired on to the Las Vegas Review-Journal, covering — among other things — the night cops beat. Every evening we hit both the Las Vegas Police Department and the Clark County Sheriff’s office, located in separate buildings blocks apart and on opposite sides of Glitter Gulch [Fremont Street].

Pileggi’s series centers on the man who occupied the sheriff’s office back then, Ralph Lamb, a member of a powerful political clan that included brothers Darwin [a Clark County commissioner when we were there who also landed an uncredited role in the 1966 Western The Professionals] and Floyd, a very powerful state senator who chaired that body’s Finance Committee.

But we knew Pileggi had sold out utterly when we watched the very first episode of the series, in which Lamb is appointed sheriff by the Las Vegas mayor after his predecessor is gunned down by the Chicago mob.

We laughed. Lamb was appointed by the county commission in 1961, since the post was a county office wholly outside the mayor’s jurisdiction. His predecessor, Butch Leypoldt, far from being gunned down by wiseguys, quit his post to take an appointment with the state Gaming Control Board.

In a later episode, the mayor who named Lamb to the job loses his office because he refuses to wear makeup, unlike his mob-backed opponent — a glib reference to the Nixon-Kennedy debates, where Nixon declined makeup and was judged the loser by TV audiences [unlike radio listeners, who gave the nod to Tricky].

In reality, Oran K. Gragson, the mayor who held office then was elected in 1959, well before Lamb’s appointment, and didn’t leave office until 1975. And what drove him to run for office was his discovery of a burglary ring operating inside the city police department.

But that doesn’t fit with the Hollywood story line, so out went the facts and in came convenient fiction.

A convenient myth

Lamb is portrayed as a stalwart mob fighter, which was hardly the case. Sure, Lamb did once up a famous Chicago wiseguy, but that’s only because Johnny “The Gent” Rosselli violated a prime directive, making a show of hitting the Strip casino circuit in a way certain to draw the unwanted attention of regulators.

Here’s how A.D. Hopkins of the Las Vegas Review-Journal described the encounter:

Rosselli and one Nicholas “Peanuts” Danolfo were sitting in a booth at the Desert Inn with Moe Dalitz, the proprietor, when Lamb sent in a rookie cop to tell Rosselli to come downtown and have that mandatory conversation with Lamb. Rosselli was 61 by then, but he had worked for Al Capone and had once beaten a narcotics rap when the arresting officer disappeared, permanently. He told the young cop to get lost, just as Lamb had expected. The sheriff had instructed the officer to be no hero that day, so the rookie retired to the parking lot, started his engine, and waited.

Now Lamb went into the resort and pointed out to Rosselli the discourtesy he had shown an officer. Then he grabbed Rosselli by his expensive necktie, dragged him across the table, and slapped him around a while. Danolfo started to jump in but Dalitz, spotting another officer coming up behind Danolfo to sucker punch him, grabbed his necktie and bade Danolfo resume his seat, observe and learn. Lamb threw Rosselli into the back-seat cage of the rookie’s waiting cruiser and sent him to jail, ordering the extra touch of delousing. Rosselli made bail and left town.

Note that companion in the booth, one Morris Barney Dalitz, late of the Cleveland Syndicate and the resident mastermind of the casino skim devised by Meyer Lansky [aka Hyman Roth in Godfather II]. Lamb made no attempt to rough up or harass Moe [a gentleman we also lunched with in 1966, having no idea who he was at the time other than the grandfatherly type oddly eager to buy a new 19-year-old reporter a delightful meal].

No, Lamb didn’t slap Dalitz, who was a real power. Moe channeled millions, built hospitals, funded golf courses, gave to charities.

Another friend of Ralph

Another good buddy of Sheriff Ralph was Benny “The Cowboy” Binion, a murderous thug from Texas who built his own Sin City gambling empire despite a conviction for killing a fellow bootlegger in his native Dallas back in 1931. He beat another murder rap by shooting himself in the shoulder, and contracted the killing of “Russian Louie” Strauss through Las Vegas wiseguy Jimmy “The Weasel” Fratianno.

With a felony conviction, Binion should’ve been denied a casino license, but Las Vegas Sun publishers Hank Greenspun — who got his start in Vegas as publicist for mobster Benjamin “Bugsy” Siegel — churned out the ink in Benny’s defense,

Why esnl is feeling a bit like Tonto

Never willing to allow a pun to elude us, we say we’re like Tonto because we are in need of some Chemo Savvy [not the Kemo Sabe Johnny Depp will cultivate in his new take on the Tonto role in the old Lone Ranger saga, scheduled for release next July].

We’re still recovering from last month’s surgery, from which we emerged minus a bladder, a prostate, and 20 lymph nodes, including one that had sprouted some of the same highly aggressive micropapillary cancer cells that necessitated the bladder removal. [We also had prostate cancer, an adenoma that was in the very early stages of development and is not a problem].

Metastasis to the lymph nodes means the probability of more cancer; hence the need for chemo.

Two types of chemo are on offer, one having considerably milder side effects than the other — though my thinning locks are likely victims under either regime. The Kaiser oncologists recommend the less noxious course, based on best [albeit limited] evidence.

My surgeon gives me good odds [80 percent] though the chemo doc is less certain, given that chemo for micropapillary bladder cancer hasn’t been subjected to any rigorous studies because the cancer is relatively rare.

So we’ll be charting some new territory, and with less hair to shade us from the sun.

Treatment would likely start next month.

We’re back, but slow. . .very, very slow

Both bladder and prostate were malignant, and it’s spread to the lymph nodes.

Surgery was long and extensive, and we spent the first six days in the hospital, followed by a stay in a nursing home almost as traumatic as the surgery [of which we'll have much, much more to say].

One positive thing: The cancer weight loss diet [down 20+ pounds].