Colonoscopy and pictures

So I had my colonoscopy on Friday. It went well. Dr. Jani found a few internal hemorrhoids, as was expected, and some inflammation around my anastemosis (the point where the reconnected my colon after the resection). That wasn't expected and he took a biopsy. I gather it's likely not anything to be worried about... maybe they'll just give me some antibiotics or something.

I got to get doped up on Propofol again. That stuff is ridiculous. Apparently I was hilarious when I was coming out of it.

Afterwards, I ate some food finally. Then Emily and I drove out to Thurmont to watch her horse instructor give a lesson to a barn friend of Emily. It took forever to get out there and the directions were really squirrelly, but we made it. It was certainly very pretty. It was nice to get out of the house. Then we went down to Frederick and ate dinner at Nido's, a very yummy Italian restaurant.

Here are some pictures:

This is the funny shirt Holly bought me for my birthday.


This is me and a Chinese Crested, Cutie, at the farm yesterday. I hadn't been there or sitting down for more than a minute or two before she jumped in my lap.


This is the other Chinese Crested at the farm, Cookie. Apparently she was cold.

Birthday and concert

So my birthday has come and gone. It was fun. Emily bought me some presents and Holly got me a funny shirt, for which pictures exist but I don't have them yet. That night we went to Baldwin's Station for the first time to eat. It was a nice place. I've been fairly cold lately and I forgot a jacket and we ate outside, so I was pretty cold for a while unfortunately. My food was excellent and I totally gorged myself though. Emily also thought her food was very good. We'll have to add that and Sykesville to the list of places that we take people visiting.

Last night we went to see Thievery Corporation. The music was very good and the performers (there were sometimes up to 14 people on stage I believe) were all very good. But again, the same complaint I had about PJ Harvey only more so this time: the bass is mixed WAY too loud. I appreciate that they have a bajillion watts of power they can use to shake our insides, but good lord I want to be able to hear something other than deafening bass. It definitely diminished the enjoyment of the concert. I really like the Ram's Head On Stage venue in Annapolis (where we saw Marcus Miller and Ingrid Michaelson) because it's small and they appear to have competent engineers who mix things well. The sound has always been excellent there.

I was thinking last night of all the bands I have seen in concert and I think I will collect them here for posterity, in roughly chronological order to the best of my memory:

Less Than Jake (several times)
RX Bandits (opened for LTJ in like 1999)
311 (several times)
Jimmy's Chicken Shack (opened for 311)
Korn, Rob Zombie, Orgy, and Videodrone (one concert)
Bela Fleck & the Flecktones (several times)
Medeski, Martin, & Wood
Bela Fleck & Edgar Meyer
London Royal Philharmonic Orchestra
Gipsy Kings
Stanley Clarke, John-Luc Ponty, and Al Di Meola
Bela Fleck, John-Luc Ponty, and Stanley Clarke
George Duke & Stanley Clarke
Pancho Sanchez & the Orlando Philharmonic Orchestra
Nine Inch Nails, Bauhaus, and TV On The Radio
John Scofield
Ingrid Michaelson
Marcus Miller (once solo and once opening for George Duke)
Pine Leaf Boys
PJ Harvey
Thievery Corporation


Surely there are many missing here, but I'll have to come back and add them as they pop into my head. Also can you see my musical tastes changing from 8th grade to now?

Some more updates

I had a PET/CT a week ago now. I haven't seen Dr. Kasamon yet about it (and other things) but I did get an email where he mentioned that it was again perfect, which is excellent news. I also had a renal ultrasound which showed my kidneys are performing perfectly after my stent was removed.

I saw my dentist again and he fixed a filling that I had cracked. A day after that another one cracked. That's three this year. I am very unlucky. Today I had my teeth cleaned and x-rayed, and there were not any other cavities which is certainly welcome news.

Next week I have an office appointment with Dr. Kasamon and I've having another colonoscopy with Dr. Jani. Not really looking forward to the colonoscopy, but it will be first super thorough inspection of things since the surgery. It's actually to identify the source of some GI bleeding I've been having which is highly likely to just be some internal hemorrhoids. Avastin can cause that to happen in some people. Hopefully he finds them and I get a clean bill of health from that one.

I do not like Xeloda. I'm going to go back to the IV 5-FU. Yeah, it sucks having the pump for 2 days. I also didn't like the side effects of the anti-nausea and steroid, but I think I can get those waived as well and just treat nausea as needed. It sucks way more not being able to use your hands to really do much of anything for 2/3 weeks and not being able to walk straight because your feet hurt. That sucks a lot more. I have pictures of my peeling hands that maybe I'll put up one of these days. I tried it at least. It was more convenient in some respects, but all in all seems to be the less good option for me. At least with the IV I have basically no side effects at all and am good to go once I get disconnected.

How exactly I'm going to live with this in the long term is an interesting question. I'm eventually going to have to start working full weeks again, and the IV is going to be annoying. I'll just have to go into work with the pump with me and probably work some time on Saturdays now and again. Sucks. Oh well. The textbook treatment scenario is that I continue taking 5-FU and Avastin indefinitely. Well, for most people that means at most a couple of years (then they die). If indeed I am still a paragon of not having cancer in a couple of years, I think I'm going to give some push back as to whether I really need to be taking this stuff all the time. No doctor is going to take me off of it because they don't want to be responsible should it come back. Since I am such a statistical outlier anyway though, nobody really has any idea what I should do. I think after I've put with this for a while I'd be willing to roll the dice and see if it comes back. If it does, oh well, I'll go through treatment again. If not, great.

Emily and I were planning to go to a demolition derby last weekend, but it was rained out. This weekend we're going to see Thievery Corporation in concert. Hopefully that is fun!

It's almost an afterthought to me, but tomorrow is also my birthday. Emily has bought me some presents, so I get to open things too!

Long time no post!

It seems like it's been forever since I've made a post on here. I'm losing steam of keeping this thing up to date. Seems like I just write the same thing over and over. I forget where we left off, so I'll just guess rather than take the two minutes it will take to read the last post.

I have had one cycle (which is two weeks on, one week off... I'm on the off week) of Xeloda. I like it from a convenience perspective. It definitely made me more fatigued than the two day IV did. I also developed much more severe hand and foot syndrome by the end of it. It wasn't too bad up until the last couple of days. By the last Sunday and the first Monday off (this Monday) I basically couldn't walk straight because my feet were so sensitive. I talked to Dr. Kasamon about it today and he said my symptoms "weren't that bad" and he is right given how much worse it could be, though it still sucked. There is a fine line to draw between managing symptoms and killing cancer. We're going to work through a few more cycles titrating the dose down until we can get it so that the irritation doesn't get quite to the point it did this time.

We also (again) discussed how weird my particular presentation of rectal cancer was. He commented that if my primary tumor had been higher up in my colon it likely would have taken 10 years to metastasize it's way out. It's probable that mine took a lucky quick route out of my rectum into this peripheral lymph system that runs up and down your spine, which could explain my distant metastasis in my neck. Nobody will ever know for sure though, not that it really matters either. We also talked about Horner's symdrome (one pupil bigger than the other), which is what they're calling what I have. Apparently there are two sets of ganglions (like mini-brains, just a big ball of nerves) running up and down your spine on each side that perform a sort of first-pass processing of nerve signals before getting to your brain. Well it turns out that one of the ganglions that control some muscles in the face and eyes is right next to your subclavian vein where central lines (e.g. a port) are placed. It's odd that it took so long after having a port and what-not that this happened, and it's also odd that it's on the opposite side. But interesting nonetheless. I'm going to see a neurophomologist sometime in the near future who specializes in this sort of thing. I doubt there's anything really to be done about it, but we'll see. For whatever reason this month is absolutely ridiculous in terms of doctors visits and things of that sort. I count about 15 appointments that I have over the month of September.

I went for a bike ride today, first one in quite some time. It didn't go so well. I'm in terrible shape, and I had a milkshake at lunch. That was also a bad idea. I hope that I can make it out to ride at least vaguely more often. Even the 45 minutes today was a hell of a lot better than the nothing that I usually do. I want to go camping this weekend, though I haven't yet shared this fact with Emily. Maybe we'll drag Pat and Minh Chau along too! The weather here has been absolutely gorgeous the last few days and will continue to be as such for another week or so it seems. A cold front came through. Lows at night in the 50s, highs in the day low 70s. It's like Fall only earlier!

Emily and I bought a "real" bed finally this Monday. No more sleeping on a futon, though I have come to rather enjoy it. I suspect neither of us is sleeping all that well thanks to it though. As several of you have figured out, we spent an obscene amount of money on a queen size Tempur-Pedic "RhapsodyBed". We've slept on one before (at Emily's former Florida neighbor's house) and it was pretty amazing. Tempur-Pedic pillows are also very nice and they kindly threw a few of those in to sweeten the deal. But good lord does the stuff smell terrible out of the factory! We've got a pillow in my room airing right now so it doesn't gas us in our sleep. So we skipped from futon to one of the most expensive "sleep systems" you can get! Woohoo!

Here are some pictures from our Florida trip:

This is me sitting under an umbrella at the pool.

A big old Florida banana spider

A couple of big ole' Florida banana spiders