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.

Healthcare crisis: UC plans a hidden fee hike?

And there’s a Berkeley protest rally coming. . .

From reclaim UC:

Despite the fact that UC administrators seem generally to have shifted their focus away from making students pay more for their education, and towards shoring up their support amongst members of the faculty and weakening the power of organized labor on campus through speedup, downsizing, and automation, recent moves by the administration around the UC Student Health Insurance Plan could result in what is effectively a new fee increase for graduate and undergraduate students.

Partly in response to a campaign by the Student-Worker’s Union (UAW 2865) for the elimination of caps on lifesaving care and for free preventative pre-natal care — reforms which would bring UC SHIP more in line with the regulations of the Affordable Care Act — management has initiated a push to raise SHIP fees for all students covered by the plan.  They are claiming that UC SHIP has been operating at an annual deficit of around $20 million, and that fee increases are therefore urgent and inevitable.  This despite the fact that the UC medical centers are earning over $900 million in annual profits – profits that could be used to help fund the insurance plan.  In a report recently delivered to the graduate assembly, outgoing President Yudof proposed student health insurance fee increases of up to 70% over the next three years — increases that would amount to approximately $1,500 per person.  While the administration would like to present their push for higher health insurance fees as a matter of the prudent management of a faltering program, when put in the context of recent antagonisms at the UCs, it appears much more as an attempt to find a politically tenable means of raising student fees while claiming not to be doing so.

It’s one of their backup plans.  We’ll know in a few months whether it works.

Video alert: The Rise of the ‘Biotechnosciences’

A critical debunking of the genomics craze from two different perspectives, by way of the Royal Society for the encouragement of Arts, Manufactures and Commerce [RSA]:

The program notes:

Leading-edge bioscience promised so much — but did it really deliver? Renowned neuroscientist Steven Rose and sociologist Hilary Rose visit the RSA to tackle the claims of the bioscience industry head on.

Bear in mind that the same hype and promises of vast wealth tackled by the Roses is also at the core of UC Berkeley’s new direction as the self-designated scientific hub of the “green energy revolution,” premised on the use of genetically engineered microbes and plants to replace our addiction to fossil fuels.

San Onofre: Southern California nuclear roulette

We’ll begin with a Tuesday RT report on the plant:

The program notes:

Nuclear energy is responsible for powering nearly 20 percent of the US, and in Southern California the San Onofre nuclear power plant has created much debate in the surrounding community. The station has been closed for about a year due to a leak that was detected in the steam generator tubes, but despite the wishes of the people living the area to keep the plant closed, the utility company is pushing to bring the reactor back online. Arnie Gundersen, chief engineer for Fairewinds Energy Education, analyzes the situation.

Plant with a history

We’ve been interested in Southern California’s San Onofre nuclear power station since first arrived in California back in 1967.

We worked as a reporter and then as city editor for the late Oceanside Blade-Tribune, and the plant was a few miles to the north, a sight we passed often on trips to Los Angeles and Orange County. The plant’s second domed containment structure was rising at the time, and we occasionally mused about the potential impacts of an earthquake and/or tsunami [since the plant is right on the shoreline].

The 2011 earthquake-spawned Fukushima disaster increased our concerns, since we had family living a few miles from the reactor site.

Then came word last year that new steam pipes designed to last 40 years were failing after 22 months, forcing a shutdown of one of the plant’s two reactor units.

And the latest, stunning twist

Now comes word that plant owners Southern California Edison knew of the potential problems before the system was installed, but opted to go ahead anyway.

Abby Sewell of the Los Angeles Times reports:

[Sen. Barbara] Boxer’s office cited a leaked report from Mitsubishi Heavy Industries — the manufacturer of the steam generators — obtained by her office. It is the first indication from government officials that Edison and Mitsubishi knew the now-shuttered system had problems before it was installed.

Boxer and U.S. Rep. Edward J. Markey (D-Mass.) wrote to Nuclear Regulatory Commission Chairwoman Allison Macfarlane on Wednesday and said the Mitsubishi report “indicates that Southern California Edison (SCE) and MHI were aware of serious problems with the design of San Onofre nuclear power plant’s replacement steam generators before they were installed” and “rejected enhanced safety modifications and avoided triggering a more rigorous license amendment and safety review process.”

Read the rest.

More from the letter via Don Bauder of the San Diego Reader:

“This newly-obtained information concerns us greatly, and we urge the NRC to immediately conduct a thorough investigation” into whether SCE and Mitsubishi failed to make necessary safety enhancements, say the legislator. States the letter, “All people in our nation, including the 8.7 million people who live within 50 miles of the San Onofre plant, must have confidence in the NRC’s commitment to put safety before any other concern.”

Michael R. Blood of the Associated Press reports on corporate and government responses to the letter:

In a statement, the NRC said it received the letter and “will review all available information in making a judgment as to whether the plant would meet our safety standards if restart were permitted.”

Edison said in a statement the company “takes very seriously all allegations raised by the letter” and would comply with all requests for information and documents.

“SCE is strongly committed to the transparent review of its operations at San Onofre and the safety of the public and its employees,” the company said.

Mitsubishi spokesman Patrick Boyle did not immediately respond to an email and phone message seeking comment.

Read the rest.

Chart of the day: We’re better than Albania!

From Sociological Images, graphic evidence of the decline in American public health. Click on the image to enlarge:

An esnl PSA: CATNIP: EGRESS TO OBLIVION?

In light of our musings on medical cannabis, we provide an equal time response opportunity in the form of a Sundance-debuting, audience award-winning public service announcement:

The program notes:

Debuting at the 2013 Sundance Film Festival and available only on YouTube

Catnip is all the rage with today’s modern feline, but do we really understand it? This film frankly discusses the facts about this controversial substance.

Watch more short films curated by Sundance Institute.

Written and Directed by Jason Willis. Starring Giovanni Dominice, Neil Kight and Terry Easley.

Chemo Chronicles: Status, and another drug

We made a trip to see our oncologist this week, and the word back is good.

Indeed, we’re told, we’re handling the chemotherapy better than the average patient. And while we received only half the scheduled dose at last week’s single-dose session because of some worrisome blood test results, that’s par for the course in this new and relatively experimental form of treatment.

Oh, and the hair is starting to go, as we discovered during a Monday brushing after noticing some silver threads amongst the white cotton of our pillow case.

All of which means that we’re on for our second of four dreaded double-whammy sessions Tuesday, hopefully without the more painful consequences of the first go-round. We get a total of twelve chemo sessions spread out over four months, of which four are the five-hour double-whammy mix of a gemcitabine hydrochloride and cisplatin. The next two sessions consist only of gemcitabine. Then comes a one week break, and the cycle begins anew for a total of four times.

Meanwhile, we indulge very modestly in the medical cannabis we’re allowed. Following Tuesday’s cookie, tincture, and smoke experience, we confined ourselves only to the nocturnal tincture Wednesday, perhaps helping us get a good night’s sleep.

Another banned drug treatment shows promise

This time, it’s another banned drug from the Sixties, psilocybin, and it’s being used not to treat terminal cancer itself but to alleviate patient anxiety.

Here’s one woman’s experience, via the New York University Psilocybin Cancer Anxiety Study:

From New York University vias Newswise:

Improvements in the diagnosis and treatment of cancers in recent years have led to a marked increase in patients’ physical survival rates. While doctors can treat the physical disease, what is not well understood is how best to address the psychological needs of patients with cancer.

In addition to the physical pain associated with cancer, many patients also experience psychologically harmful symptoms of anxiety, depression, anger, and denial. Social isolation, in addition to hopelessness, helplessness and loss of independence, has also been associated with significant psychological suffering in patients coping with advanced-stage cancer.

A recently published book chapter “Use of the Classic Hallucinogen Psilocybin for Treatment of Existential Distress Associated with Cancer,” reviews the potential of a novel psychoactive drug, psilocybin, in alleviating the psychological and spiritual distress that often accompanies a life-threatening cancer diagnosis.

The chapter, published in Psychological Aspects of Cancer: A Guide to Emotional and Psychological Consequences of Cancer, Their Causes, and Their Management, was co-written by Anthony P. Bossis, PhD, Clinical Assistant Professor of Psychiatry and Oral and Maxillofacial Pathology, Radiology, and Medicine at the New York University College of Dentistry (NYUCD) and Langone Medical Center.

The hallucinogen treatment model with psilocybin has been shown to induce a mystical or spiritual experience and is a unique therapeutic approach to reduce the anxiety of terminal cancer patients.

“Mystical or peak consciousness states in cancer patients have been

Chart of the day: Satisfaction, American-style

From Gallup, a new poll reveals that we’re happiest with the military and the war on terror:

Chemo Chronicles: From fug to fugue

Despite the nausea, constipation, and other sundry physical effects of the cancer chemotherapy we’re undergoing, we’d have to say the worst impact has been the creeping mental miasma.

Regular esnl readers have no doubt detected the results in the decline of frequency and depth of our posts, initially the result of the simple shock that comes from learning your body has turned on itself, followed by the physical shock of two surgeries.

Besides the loss of a cancerous bladder and prostate, we also find ourselves with a new means of draining our kidneys, thanks to the removal of a section of intestine and its reshaping into a conduct to carry urine from our surgically truncated uterers into a puckering pink urine-dripping extrusion [stoma] to the right of our navel.

There was pain after both surgeries [the first via catheter, the second by a large incision now commemorated in in a scar running betwixt navel to pubis, we stopped taking painkillers two days after leaving the hospital, leaving us an unwanted surplus of Percocets.

While the process of getting used to wearing what’s colorfully called an “urostomy bag” proved something of a trial, we managed to adapt to the stoma-drip-catching self-adhesive bags with the minimum of extra trips to the laundry.

But the biopsy showed the cancer, a rather rare micropapillary breed, had spread to at least one lymph node, and hence the four-month chemo regime, starting with our first double hit 8 January.

Of our three monthly sessions, the first is the real shit-kicker, a double dose of chemical cocktails administered over five hours. The nausea began on the second day, and lingered two more days, kept in relative check by another two-part chemical cocktail. Nine days of constipation began on the second day after the session, adding a whole new level of discomfort and ended only by a trip to the emergency room.

What still lingered was a peculiar sort of mental lethargy, a lingering mentational malady which allowed us to read a dozen hours a day but without the fuel to synthesize my responses into writing. Hence the decline in frequency of posting.

Our progeny and several friends had been urging us to get a medical marijuana letter, so we finally did, overcoming our natural inclination to add our name to yet another list.

So we became a member of a local medical marijuana club, and have now procured our first-ever California-legal weed. The only previous legal drugs we’d experienced had been our first dose of LSD in 1966, swallowed the night before it became illegal in Nevada, and hashish we bought at an Amsterdam coffee house in 2006 on the same trip where we bought a batch of just-plucked Psilocybin mushrooms procured from one of those now-closed Smart Shops legally offering both ’shrooms and live peyote cacti.

We mention this because we’re no strangers to cannabis, and we’ve done more than our share [1966-72] of psychedelics, with 2006 being our last experience of the latter.

We learned a lot about mind-altering drugs during our three-year service as scribe and block print carver for a Tantric Hindu artist and non-guru guru. The Tantrics and Shavites have developed a Prime Directive of cannabis use which we still follow: Never consume or ingest cannabis within three hours of eating. The reason is simple: Cannabis pulls blood into the brain, and when you consume while you’re digesting you create a conflict, with blood craved by the brain diverted to the digestive system, and leading to lethargy and sleepiness.

29 January 2013, Panasonic DMZ-ZS19, ISO 400, 12.5 mm, 1/50 sec, f5

With a chemo-sensitized gut, we followed the rules today, and the result has been a distinct lifting of the mental lethargy, using the fruits of our visit to the Berkeley club a block from Casa esnl: A free Rhino Pellet [a cinnamon cookie made with cannabis-infused butter], an oral nocturnal cannabis and essential oil tincture [left], and a pinch of hash to brighten up our minor remnant of some seven-year-old Humboldt homegrown.

Our stomach is calm, our energy and mood increased to the point we tackled some serious house cleaning/organizing, and we’ve also done more posts than usual.

Intimations of other benefits

We also bear in mind that a growing body of research indicates that a non-psychoactive component of cannabis inhibits growth in cancer cells.

As San Francisco Chronicle reporter Victoria Colliver wrote last 18 September:

A growing body of early research shows a compound found in marijuana – one that does not produce the plant’s psychotropic high – seems to have the ability to “turn off” the activity of a gene responsible for metastasis in breast and other types of cancers.

Two scientists at San Francisco’s California Pacific Medical Center Research Institute first released data five years ago that showed how this compound – called cannabidiol – reduced the aggressiveness of human breast cancer cells in the lab.

>snip<

“The preclinical trial data is very strong, and there’s no toxicity. There’s really a lot of research to move ahead with and to get people excited,” said Sean McAllister, who along with scientist Pierre Desprez, has been studying the active molecules in marijuana – called cannabinoids – as potent inhibitors of metastatic disease for the past decade.

Red the rest.

The National Cancer Institute website is less adulatory on its Cannabis and Cannabinoids web page, noting only this:

No clinical trials of Cannabis as a treatment for cancer in humans were identified in a PubMed search; however, a single small study of intratumoral injection of delta-9-THC in patients with recurrent glioblastoma multiforme reported potential antitumoral activity.

Donald Abrams, chief of oncology at UCSF physician said this to NBC News:

“If this plant were discovered in the Amazon today, scientists would be falling all over each other to be the first to bring it to market.”

And consider this, from the Science Updates blog of Cancer Research UK:

Through many detailed experiments, handily summarised in this recent article in the journal Nature Reviews Cancer, scientists have discovered that various cannabinoids (both natural and synthetic) have a wide range of effects in the lab, including:

• Triggering cell death, through a mechanism called apoptosis
• Stopping cells from dividing
• Preventing new blood vessels from growing into tumours
• Reducing the chances of cancer cells spreading through the body, by stopping cells from moving or invading neighbouring tissue
• Speeding up the cell’s internal ‘waste disposal machine’ – a process known as autophagy – which can lead to cell death

All these effects are thought to be caused by cannabinoids locking onto the CB1 and CB2 cannabinoid receptors. It also looks like cannabinoids can exert effects on cancer cells that don’t involve cannabinoid receptors, although it isn’t yet clear exactly what’s going on there.

Read the rest.

And go here [PDF] for a 2010 metareview of medical studies, including Multiple Sclerosis, chronic pain, glaucoma, HIV/AIDS, nausea, brain cancer, and more.

And another wrapup’s here.

The bottom line: Since we’re engaged in fighting cancer, we’ll take all the help we can get.

[Oh, and as for psilocybin, see here and here.]

Quote of the day: Madness from the laboratory

Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory is one of the world’s leading research centers in nanotechnology, the fabrication of incredibly small particles of chemicals that behave in strange ways because of their very tiny size.

But there’s the potential for billions, even trillions in profits, so the rush to develop commercial applications surges forward, while concerns for the health of humans and the rest of the biosphere lag far behind.

From Heather Millar, writing in Orion magazine:

Some published research has shown that inhaled nanoparticles actually become more toxic as they get smaller. Nano–titanium dioxide, one of the most commonly used nanoparticles (Pop-Tarts, sunblock), has been shown to damage DNA in animals and prematurely corrode metals. Carbon nanotubes seem to penetrate lungs even more deeply than asbestos.

What little we know about the environmental effects of nanoparticles—and it isn’t very much—also raises some red flags. Nanoparticles from consumer products have been found in sewage wastewater, where they can inhibit bacteria that help break down the waste. They’ve been found to accumulate in plants and stunt their growth. Another study has shown that gold nanoparticles become more concentrated as they move up the food chain from plants to herbivores.

>snip<

As a society, we’ve been here before—releasing a “miracle technology” before its potential health and environmental ramifications are understood, let alone investigated. Remember how DDT was going to stamp out malaria and typhus and revolutionize agriculture? How asbestos was going to make buildings fireproof? How bisphenol A (BPA) would make plastics clear and nearly shatterproof? How methyl tertiary-butyl ether (MTBE) would make gasoline burn cleanly? How polychlorinated biphenyls (PCBs) were going to make electrical networks safer? How genetically modified organisms (GMOs) were going to end hunger?

Read the rest.

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.

Headline of the day: Downsizing Eurogranny

From Radio France Internationale:

French retirement home throws out 94-year-old woman on winter weekend

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.

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.

Headline of the day: Uh, read your history books

Deportations of the marginal? Hasn’t Germany done that before?

From The Guardian:

Germany ‘exporting’ old and sick to foreign care homes

Pensioners are being sent to care homes in eastern Europe and Asia in an austerity move dismissed as ‘inhumane deportation’

Quote of the day: Death of the social contract

From Salvatore Babones, originally published in Australian Options Magazine and reprinted in Truthout:

Over the past forty years, America has become much more politically correct with regard to gender and sexualiy. Men do not openly display calendars featuring topless models on their office walls, and public gay bashing is now considered inappropriate, even in Republican circles. But gender and sexuality are issues that transcend social class. Even rich, powerful men have gay children – or may be gay themselves. Even rich, powerful men have wives.

On every other issue, America – or at least American politics – has swung violently to the right. The more social class is involved, the further to the right America has swung. Poverty was once a social disease to be cured; it is now an individual crime to be punished. Put it down to individualism, conservatism, neoliberalism, or whatever -ism you want, America is now the world’s greatest reactionary force.

Unfortunately, all the evidence is that the rest of the world is following America down the road to perdition. Nowhere are national health insurance schemes, access to free education, and old age pensions being expanded. Nowhere is the world moving forward. Everywhere the social gains of the twentieth century are either being eroded, or destroyed.

Headline of the day: Gee, who’d a-thunk it?

From Medical Daily:

No, Teen Marijuana Use Doesn’t Cause Brain Damage, But Alcohol Does

A new study has found that while marijuana had no effect on the health of teenagers’ brain tissue, alcohol did