33 T-shirts
Posted by Sappho on May 15th, 2012 filed in Daily Life
There’s a cancer patient blog called 33 dresses. Its author, Elissa Ashwood, “breast cancer survivor in training,” is wearing 33 dresses, one for each day of radiation treatment, and posting as she goes. When I got her tweet, I realized that I didn’t have anywhere near 33 dresses, but I probably had at least 33 T-shirts.
This week is my first full week at work. It’s also the week after my last cycle of chemotherapy before radiation treatment (I also get more chemotherapy after radiation – it’s called “sandwich therapy”). My mother flew out yesterday to help me, from the other side of the country. Mom’s been a great support through all of this; having taught at a medical school, she helps me understand all the medical aspects. I’ve been sure to get her copies of my ultrasounds, my pathology report, and my blood tests. Now, though, she’s doing a different Mom task: sorting my clothes. Today I came home to find all my clothes sorted by type. Well, not all of my clothes, but the ones that Joel has managed to dig up and wash. There they were, the piles of underwear, sweaters, office shirts, dressy shirts, dresses, and T-shirts.
4 dresses. (Joel tells me he’ll have a couple more for me tomorrow.)
More than 33 T-shirts.
Since I have now reached the day when I finally fully recover my appetite after chemotherapy, I did follow the spirit of Elissa Ashwood’s blog today by eating a serving of chocolate cake.
Comment now »
Papoulias tries in vain to form a government: Elections, here we come
Posted by Sappho on May 14th, 2012 filed in Greek News
But first, before I give you today in Greek politics, a lighter note: one of my Greek cousins sent me, on Saturday, a link to this beautiful video of an osprey catching fish.
Now for today in Greek politics: If you were to range the Greek parties that made it into Parliament from right to left, they might go: Golden Dawn, the Independent Greeks, ND, PASOK, the Democratic Left, SYRIZA, KKE. And, as the parties gear up for the almost certain second round of elections, probably to come in June, the bitterest feuds seem to be between parties next to each other on this spectrum. In particular, SYRIZA and the Democratic Left, which days ago were talking about forming a government together, are now deeply at odds.
In theory, SYRIZA and the Democratic Left want the same thing: to reject the austerity measures and stay in the EU and the euro zone. (The Independent Greeks also support this course.) The KKE stands alone in wanting to leave the euro zone. ND and PASOK have already committed themselves to austerity measures to keep Greece in the euro zone and getting EU/IMF loans, and, given that Golden Dawn wants to put landmines on the border to keep immigrants out, I tend to consider its economic positions moot.
Read the rest of this entry »
Comment now »
Breast cancer patient bags and Superdog #beyondthefarm
Posted by Sappho on May 12th, 2012 filed in Daily Life
I waited till the last minute to register for the Stanford Beyond the Farm event I attended today, a Stanford Professional Women of Orange County gathering at a clubhouse in Irvine to make fleece blankets and stuff bags with items for women with breast cancer. This week is both a chemotherapy week and the week I returned to work (work Monday, chemotherapy Tuesday, recovery from chemotherapy Wednesday and Thursday, radiological oncologist appointment and then work on Friday), so, between the chemotherapy fatigue and the return to work, I wasn’t sure I’d have the energy. Finally I decided I did. It turns out I didn’t actually need to register for this one; though some Beyond the Farm events had a limit to how many people could do them, this one used everyone who showed up, many more than the 11 people I saw registered when I’d registered the night before. The charity we were helping is called Breast Cancer Solutions. More on Breast Cancer Solutions and on Beyond the Farm in a bit, but first I’ll be self-indulgent and tell you how my day went before the event.
Read the rest of this entry »
Comment now »
“We have forced all of Europe to speak about the great change brought about by the Greek vote”
Posted by Sappho on May 10th, 2012 filed in Greek News
Today the mandate to form a new Greek government passed to PASOK, the third running party in the popular vote, ND and SYRIZA having previously failed to get sufficient coalition partners to form a government. Thus failed, for now, SYRIZA leader Alexis Tsipras’ goal to achieve a leftist government that would reject the austerity measures that are part of Greece’s debt deal. But the big story of this Greek election has been the rise of parties well to the left and right of formerly dominant ND and PASOK, and the collapse of these two parties of the Greek political center. What happens when the center cannot hold? Just who are these rising Greek parties of the left and right? And what can we expect of them?
The parties that made the 3% cut to get into the Greek parliament in the May 6th election, in order of popularity, were ND, SYRIZA, PASOK, the Independent Greeks, the KKE (Communists), Golden Dawn, and the Democratic Left. ND and PASOK have traditionally been Greece’s dominant parties, with ND the center-left party and PASOK the center-right party. As recently as the last election, they had 79% of the vote between them. This election, they had a third of the vote, with about a fifth of the vote going to a variety of parties too small even to make the cut for Parliament. I don’t think there’s been a Greek election where the vote was this scattered since 1950. While ND was technically the winner, the collapse of ND and PASOK from their former leading role, and SYRIZA’s rise from a fifth place party generally described as on the far left to second place makes SYRIZA the relative winner, so the big stories of this election have been how such a radical party reached second place, and how such a creepy right wing party as Golden Dawn got into Parliament at all.
Let me begin with the neo-fascist Golden Dawn, the scariest party of the lot (and the one party that none of the others is willing to include in a coalition government). In 2009, Golden Dawn got less than 1% of the total vote. In 2012, they got nearly 7%. What gives? Whose votes are they getting? And why?
Read the rest of this entry »
Comment now »
Two thumbs down for austerity
Posted by Sappho on May 6th, 2012 filed in Greek News
I puzzled over how to title this post: If I were to write only about the French election results, I might want to call it “Socialists triumphant,” as François Hollande gets the first Socialist victory in France in nearly twenty years. If, instead, I were to write only about the Greek results, I might want to call it “Things fall apart, the center will not hold,” for this Sunday leaves neither PASOK nor ND still standing, but rather a result so divided among various parties to the right or left of the two once dominant parties, that not only does no one party have a Parliamentary majority; no two parties do, if combined.
But if there’s one thing both results have in common, it’s that voters in both France and Greece have rejected the EU’s push toward austerity. Paul Krugman writes
Both countries held elections Sunday that were in effect referendums on the current European economic strategy, and in both countries voters turned two thumbs down. It’s far from clear how soon the votes will lead to changes in actual policy, but time is clearly running out for the strategy of recovery through austerity — and that’s a good thing.
Indeed, coming in the wake of the fall a couple of weeks ago of the government of the Netherlands, one of the EU’s most pro-austerity countries, when Geert Wilders’ Freedom Party (PVV) refused austerity measures that would bring the budget deficit in line with EU rules and the news that Spain, amidst the deepest cuts in three decades, has seen its unemployment rate leap to 24.4%, the rejection of austerity both by the EU’s shakiest economy and by the country that supplied half of “Merkozy,” the election results from France and Greece raise the question of whether the agreement to restrain spending, which EU nations reached several months ago, can possibly hold enough voter support to be sustained. But what will the practical results be, as Hollande wins one of the most difficult jobs in the world, and no one really wins in Greece?
Read the rest of this entry »
Comment now »
Approaching the New Normal
Posted by Sappho on May 2nd, 2012 filed in Daily Life
May Day: My husband’s cousin posted Facebook photos of the large (and peaceful) protest in Los Angeles. No word from my cousins about the May Day protests in Greece, where an election is fast approaching in which polls suggest that the current unpopularity of leading parties ND and PASOK may produce a ten party Parliament for the first time since 1950.
Meanwhile, here in Orange County, a place of far fewer and smaller demonstrations than LA, I saw no sign of May Day activity. My own time this week has been spent preparing to return home and preparing to return to work. On Monday, I stopped by the office, let them know that I’m expecting to return to work next week (but only for a couple of days of the week, since it’s also a chemotherapy week, and chemotherapy wipes me out for a few days), and what accomodations I’ll need. Then I exchanged email with my doctor, since my workplace wants his explicit OK before I can go back. Yesterday I got his email confirming that I can return. Today I battled the overwhelmed EDD phone system to try to reach a human being and find out how I’m supposed to notify them that I’m going back to work. (This involved repeatedly calling the EDD number, pressing 0 to get to a representative, and reaching a recording that tells me the maximum number of callers waiting for a representative has been reached. Eventually, on the fourth try, I got through to the on hold queue, and eventually from there to a representative.) I have also gone back to my 6am cell phone alarm this week, to prepare for next week, when I’ll have to wake up to go to work. No more sleeping in till 7:30am. This means I have to get used to going to bed by 9pm, since, even in the more energetic part of the cycle, chemotherapy seems to sap enough energy that I can’t get by on 8 hours of sleep. Otherwise, I feel relatively normal (if much less supplied with hair) during the latter part of the chemotherapy cycle.
Read the rest of this entry »
Comment now »
Job’s Comforters
Posted by Sappho on April 27th, 2012 filed in Theology
Xeni Jadrin, co-editor of Boing Boing, tech culture journalist, blogger, and breast cancer survivor, tweeted that someone had told her cancer was a gift. No surprise, neither Xeni nor any of her Twitter friends with cancer considers it such. Here are some of the replies she got:
@xeni There’s a big difference between identifying/extracting whatever positivity you can from a shit deal; and a gift.
@xeni girlfriend’s mom recently diagnosed with cancer, her coworker told her to accept god’s gift. GF’s mom is an atheist. She LOL’d
@xeni @tbias Of course! Every Xmas I lay out all my presents, slice them up with scalpels, then blast them with radiation.
To be clear, @Xeni said someone told her cancer was a gift & I said “If true, it comes in one hell of a shitty wrapping job.” #FuckCancer
@xeni a gift is something you want to share with others. Cancer is not that thing.
Hey, way to sell people on God’s love, fellow Christians! Whichever of you are going around telling people with cancer that they should accept it as God’s gift, cut it the hell out! You’re comforting yourselves, not your friends or acquaintances.
There’s an analogy that people sometimes use, when trying to answer the “Why so much pain?” question about God. Imagine a beautiful tapestry, but you’re looking at the wrong side of it, so all you can see is the ugly knots. You don’t know that those knots are what was needed to make that tapestry to begin with. Now, maybe that analogy works for you, and maybe it doesn’t. I’m betting it would leave GF’s mom, the atheist, cold. But take it as given, for the moment.
If you wanted to learn gratitude, would you do it by looking at the reverse of that tapestry, at the ugliest knot you could find, and telling yourself that you should be oh so grateful for that knot? No, you’d turn your eyes toward the tapestry, and remind yourself that, however ugly the knot was, the tapestry was still there.
Tell someone to accept cancer as a gift from God, and you’re telling her to stare at that ugly knot and be thankful for it.
I’m not thankful for cancer. But I’ll tell you what I am thankful for.
- I’m thankful that I’ve had this life at all, with all the joy that came with it.
- I’m thankful for my family and friends, who have been incredibly supportive as I went through surgery and started chemotherapy.
- I’m thankful that I live in a time when treatment has come as far as it has. I’m thankful for my surgery, and for my chemotherapy, and for the radiation to come.
- I’m thankful to live in a time of new, improved antinausea drugs, so I don’t have to go through the killer nausea that earlier chemotherapy patients did. I love my Aloxi and my Zofran.
- I’m thankful for my job, to which I hope to return soon, and for my insurance.
- I’m thankful that my current odds are in favor of surviving, rather than dying. 51 is younger than I’d like to die. Twice that age would be more like it
. And if I don’t get that, I’ll gladly take at least 20 more years. - I’m thankful for books and music and walks outside.
To me, at this point, those are sufficient things to be thankful for.
UPDATE: Xeni says it wasn’t a Christian who said this to her. I guess I jumped the gun, assuming (since I live in a mostly Christian country) that religious admonitions would be coming from Christians. All the rest of what I said here stands.
2 Comments »
Small Town Girl
Posted by Sappho on April 26th, 2012 filed in Books, Memory
I just finished Vanessa Williams’ new autobiography, You Have No Idea. It’s a fast read (especially compared to the book I read right before it, The Emperor of All Maladies, a medical history of cancer), and I read it in a day. Since Vanessa’s two years younger than me, and was a couple of grades behind me in school, I indeed had no idea of much of anything in her life (when you’re young, even a small age gap is a great social gulf). But we did live in the same very small town, go to the same schools, and ride the same school bus (her kid brother and my kid brother were good friends), and so I was interested to see what she’d say about Millwood, and how well her memories would match mine. Since Millwood’s the only place where my life overlaps Vanessa’s at all, the Millwood and Chappaqua part of the book is the only part I’ll comment on.
Read the rest of this entry »
Comment now »
Aunt Pat’s hundredth birthday
Posted by Sappho on April 24th, 2012 filed in Daily Life
My great-aunt, Pat, has told me for years that she had no interest in living to be a hundred. She got there anyway, despite a broken hip a couple of years ago and congestive heart failure this fall. And so her nephew Dick assembled as many of the local relatives as he could for a party at her retirement home on the nearest Sunday to her birthday. Present were a couple families of my cousins, and Aunt Pat’s driver, and her longtime accountant, and my other great-aunt, Muriel, who will be 101 in a couple of weeks. Aunt Pat always tells me that Aunt Muriel is the one person on this planet that she’s known the longest; they met when registering for classes at Berkeley, and Aunt Pat then wound up marrying Aunt Muriel’s brother. Since they live in different towns, and one is now blind and the other less mobile than before, this was a rare occasion for them to be together again.
It was also an occasion for the various cousins to see how I was faring with chemotherapy. This, though, always happened in a knot of people other than the one including Aunt Pat and Aunt Muriel; in my family, once you get to be around a hundred, people stop telling you bad news, so neither Aunt Pat nor Aunt Muriel has been informed of my cancer. For this reason, I made sure to get my hair cut before the party, the better to fit my dwindling hair under my new wig. Aunt Muriel, who has macular degeneration and can barely see, noticed no change, but Aunt Pat’s eyes were still keen enough to see that I somehow looked different, and she first questioned Dick (who replied “she looks the same to me”) and then me (I told her “it’s my hair color,” which is true – the wig is a slightly reddish brown that’s not quite my normal brown, though I did have a touch of red highlights when I was younger).
For a present, I had brought three chapters of the novel in progress, and Joel used his smart phone to play her a birthday song on Youtube. There were balloons, which we gave after the party to one of the youngest cousins. After the usual meal selection from the retirement home, we had cake and ice cream. Here is a picture of Aunt Pat blowing out her candles.
Comments Off
Blogwatch: the Salt and Light Edition
Posted by Sappho on April 24th, 2012 filed in Blogwatch
The Friends World Committee on Consultation conference, with a theme of “Being Salt and Light,” is meeting now in Nakuru, Kenya.
Diane Randall blogs about the gathering of 1000 Quakers speaking 42 languages, the diversity of worship, and how Friends live their faith in action.
Benjamin Lloyd writes about his experience at the conference in Kenya.
From Margaret Fraser’s blog about the conference: Esther Mombo starts us off.
An Ekklesia article about the conference.
The official World Conference of Friends 2012 web site, with pictures, videos, and a study guide.
Other links, unrelated tot he FWCC conference:
The Pangea Blog has a series of posts onChristian reexamination of the doctrine of hell.
Via my sister, A Surprising Risk for Toddlers on Playground Slides (trying to protect your child by sliding down with the child in your lap may make your child less safe).
Bint Alshamsa begs you not to vote for Romney.
Paleoconservative blogger Daniel Larison thinks that We Can Know Something About What Romney’s Foreign Policy Will Look Like
Rod Dreher on Marx at the Ballpark
Eve Tushnet reviews a book by Mary Eberstadt on the sexual revolution. They are, naturally, on the same side: Catholics who defend Church teaching on sexuality (unlike the large number of US Catholics who reject said teaching). The review, though, is a mix of praise and critique:
The biggest flaws in Eberstadt’s book are a lack of focus and a total absence of economic realities. I’m no Marxist, but economic pressures do affect our culture of unmarriage, and our sexual dysfunctions widen the class divide; neither of these causal arrows gets discussed in Adam and Eve. “When Adam delved and Eve span, who was then a gentleman?” Everybody, apparently.
That said, the book makes a few strong contributions. Eberstadt spends a lot of time discussing the damage done by pornography….
(The part of this that interests me particularly is the bit about the intersection between economic pressures and marriage.)
Audacia Ray, who would not agree in the least with Eve Tushnet or Mary Eberstadt about pornography, also has a critique of her own side of the debate: Why the Sex Positive Movement is Bad for Sex Workers’ Rights. Given my last link, I want to be clear here that Audacia Ray still winds up sex positive, and pro-legalization; she just wants to nuance her earlier position:
But for sex positivity to be a useful framework, one that encourages the pursuit of social justice, it must also engage with the ugly pieces of sexuality, and not in a simplistically reactive way.
Four Myths About Black Marriage
Malaria Resurgence Directly Linked to Funding Cuts
Ghana Confronts Challenges of Biometric Voter Registration
Comments Off
Stronger
Posted by Sappho on April 17th, 2012 filed in Daily Life, Health and Medicine
I’m glad I’m not one of those people who dislikes Nietzsche’s epigram, because Kelly Clarkson’s “What Doesn’t Kill You (Stronger)” is stalking me. After I saw it on a friend’s FB page, I heard it in the grocery store, and now at the chemotherapy center. It must be a hit right now (I think the chemotherapy center was playing a radio station, rather than their own selection).
“My hair’s starting to fall out,” I told the chemotherapy nurse.
“You still have hair?” she said. I pulled back my bandanna and showed her. Having started with thick hair, I now have a full head of hair that looks sort of normal, if I naturally had thin hair.
“You’ll lose it all before the next treatment,” she said.
The news from the bloodwork, though, was good enough to more than balance the downside of being about to go bald. My CA-125 (cancer marker) count is way down, having fallen from a well above normal 44 to a normal 7. My white blood cell count, my absolute neutrophil count, and my platelet count have all remained easily within normal range. My red blood cell count even moved from mildly anemic before chemotherapy started to normal now. (Diet and iron pills presumably helped here, and I suspect the fact that I had lost so much blood from the cancer, before the surgery, was also a factor. So far, untreated cancer has been more damaging to my blood counts than chemotherapy.) The comprehensive metabolic panel counts for my kidney and liver are also within normal range (conscientiously drinking lots of water may have helped here).
Read the rest of this entry »
Comments Off
On tumors and cyberchondria
Posted by Sappho on April 14th, 2012 filed in Health and Medicine
One of the people in a support group I sometimes attend, for family members of people with bipolar disorder, says that he dreads the moment when his wife gets on the web to look up her medications. Inevitably, he says, she decides that her medications’ side effects are too scary, starts to cut back on one or another of them, and begins the cycle where she goes off her meds, gets manic again, and has to be put back on her meds again.
I, on the other hand, am happy when Joel checks his meds on drugs.com. I know that he’ll use the information the same way he uses the information he gets from our pharmacist: to alert himself to when he needs to call his doctor or his psychiatrist, and see whether he needs some medication adjusted or switched.
I’m reminded of that experience because today one of my Twitter friends posted a link to the article It’s Not a Tumor! The Psychology Behind Cyberchondria, about the ways in which Internet medical information and flaws in human perceptions of risks can lead some people to worry excessively about the possibility that they have severe diseases, such as cancer:
But why should simply reading an online write-up about, say, Hodgkin’s lymphoma convince us that we’ve fallen victim to the disease? A new study in the April 2012 issue of Psychological Science suggests that the irrational tendency at work in the brains of cyberchondriacs is the same as that in the brains of gamblers. Gamblers make the mistake of seeing patterns in a set of randomly generated events, deciding that a positive result on one or two rolls of the dice indicates that positive rolls of the dice will continue. For cyberchondriacs, that same tendency means deciding that hitting a streak in the list of symptoms (headache, followed by nausea, followed by fatigue) means you must also have all of the other symptoms in the list.
On the other hand, there are times when careful attention to those internet symptom lists can come in handy. The article suggests, as an example, the value of a certain amount of heightened anxiety about flu when you’re in the middle of a flu epidemic, so you know when to call the doctor. And, when I was referred to my oncologist, and, on making an appointment, found that the only information that had already been sent to the oncologist’s office was my elevated OVA1 test result, it was useful to be able to say, in response to the question “Are you being referred for an elevated OVA1 test,” “No, I have an elevated OVA1 test, dysfunctional uterine bleeding, fatigue, and a suspicious looking ultrasound,” and to find out that I needed to make a call to the regular gynecologist to make sure the oncologist got that ultrasound.
So, a touch of cyberchondria may be useful if you’re already in a higher risk situation, but more trouble than it’s worth if you’re not at such high risk, and can wait for a doctor to diagnose your symptoms.
Comments Off
Progress report, mid-Cycle 1 of chemotherapy
Posted by Sappho on April 10th, 2012 filed in Daily Life
It’s now four weeks post-hysterectomy and two weeks after I got the first round of chemotherapy (one week till I get the next). I promise I’ll eventually get you posts with non-cancer content (among other things, there are events in Mali about which I want to round up at least some information). There will even be some non-cancer content in this post (books I’ve read recently, etc.). But I’ll start with the cancer content.
General energy level: As I said on Facebook, I’m now bright, chipper, and ready to go back to work, if work took only about two hours a day. I can do many normal things, but not for a normal length of time. How much of this low energy is due to the cancer (I lost enough blood that I went into the surgery somewhat anemic), how much due to recovering from surgery, and how much due to chemotherapy, I don’t know. I suspect it’s mostly, at this point, recovery from surgery, since even women who get hysterectomies for benign reasons tend to be tired for some weeks afterwards (say other women I know who have had hysterectomies and uncomplicated recoveries from said hysterectomies). And the energy I lost from the surgery I should have back soon. But, since chemotherapy also has fatigue as a side effect, and since I’ll be getting chemotherapy for over a year (save for the break when I’ll be getting radiation instead), it may be a long time before I’m at a normal energy level.
Hysterectomy recovery, four weeks in: On Easter I took a half hour walk in the park in the morning, went to Crystal Cove in the middle of the day and walked the beach with Joel, and walked all the way up the very long stairs to the Shake Shack. Then I was tired for the rest of the day. I can now do quad stretches again, and I’m doing the First and Third Tibetans (but not the other three – those are still too much for my abdominals). But if I try to touch my toes, my stomach still hurts. I think it will be a good long while before I can do the Plank again. I am taking no pain meds, not even ibuprofen, but still wear a brace.
Read the rest of this entry »
Comments Off
Stuff my subconscious mind stores that I didn’t know it stored
Posted by Sappho on April 7th, 2012 filed in Dreams
The other day, I dreamed that someone appointed me to a board, but neglected to send me the email telling me to what position I’d been appointed. When I asked to what I’d been appointed, she rattled off the names and positions of board members so quickly that I still couldn’t figure out who had been appointed to what. (My mother says that dream sounds like real life.) I did, however, remember on waking that the name of the president of this board was Tony Agarwal.
This raised in my mind the question of where I’d gotten the last name Agarwal. Was it even a real last name? In fact, it is. Wikipedia reports that the Agrawal or Agarwal are a prominent community in northern or northwestern India, of the Kshatriya caste. But, probably more to the point of where I got the name, Agarwal turns out to be the last name of the Director of the Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL) at MIT, whom I do remember reading about recently, though I’d forgotten his name (his first name is not, however, Tony). Evidently, my subconscious mind stores away this sort of information and brings it back to me in my dreams. What Freud would make of that, I don’t know.
Comments Off
Before the cock crows twice, you will deny me three times
Posted by Sappho on April 5th, 2012 filed in Bible study
As it’s Maundy Thursday, the day in which, in the Episcopal Church in which I was raised, you wash feet and remember the Last Supper, I got to thinking of the story, in particular the part in which Jesus predicts that Peter will deny him. It reads in the Gospel of Mark like this:
And Jesus said to them, “You will all fall away; for it is written, `I will strike the shepherd, and the sheep will be scattered.’ But after I am raised up, I will go before you to Galilee.” Peter said to him, “Even though they all fall away, I will not.” And Jesus said to him, “Truly, I say to you, this very night, before the cock crows twice, you will deny me three times.” But he said vehemently, “If I must die with you, I will not deny you.” And they all said the same.
and later
And as Peter was below in the courtyard, one of the maids of the high priest came; and seeing Peter warming himself, she looked at him, and said, “You also were with the Nazarene, Jesus.”
But he denied it, saying, “I neither know nor understand what you mean.” And he went out into the gateway.
And the maid saw him, and began again to say to the bystanders, “This man is one of them.”
But again he denied it. And after a little while again the bystanders said to Peter, “Certainly you are one of them; for you are a Galilean.”
But he began to invoke a curse on himself and to swear, “I do not know this man of whom you speak.”
And immediately the cock crowed a second time. And Peter remembered how Jesus had said to him, “Before the cock crows twice, you will deny me three times.” And he broke down and wept.
Early church tradition had it that the Gospel of Mark was actually the account of Peter, as related by Mark, who had served as Peter’s interpreter. It’s an interesting choice, because the Gospel of Mark is at pains to record Peter’s every failure and misunderstanding of Jesus. I picture Peter, perhaps flawed and hot tempered and impulsive, but humble, determined that the story he tells build up not him, but his message, and that his listeners know just how flawed a man received that message.
Comments Off
Fictional Journalistic Mishaps
Posted by Sappho on April 2nd, 2012 filed in Books
I’m doing OK with the chemotherapy side effects, but, since I’ve still been a bit slow blogging, I’ll entertain you instead with a quote from the latest book I’m reading. Here’s H.G. Wells, from War of the Worlds, on why news of the Martian invasion was slow to spread:
In London that night poor Henderson’s telegram describing the gradual unscrewing of the shot was judged to be a canard, and his evening paper, after wiring for authentication from him and receiving no reply – the man was killed – decided not to print a special edition.
And, later, on his hero’s acquiring the means to escape the Martians:
‘I must have a pound,’ said the landlord, ‘and I’ve no one to drive it.’
‘I’ll give you two,’ said I, over the stranger’s shoulder.
‘What for?’
‘And I’ll bring it back by midnight,’ I said.
‘Lord!’ said the landlord; ‘what’s the hurry? I’m selling my bit of a pig. Two pounds, and you bring it back? What’s going on now?’
I explained hastily that I had to leave my home, and so secured the dog-cart. At the time it did not seem to me nearly so urgent that the landlord should leave his….
Comments Off
Chemotherapy, Cycle 1, Day 1
Posted by Sappho on March 27th, 2012 filed in Daily Life, Health and Medicine
So far, the worst thing about the chemotherapy has been the dreading getting it. But I should knock on wood and spit to avert the Evil Eye as I say this, since there’s always the possibility that I simply haven’t hit the bad part yet. The nurse says that nausea, if it kicks in, will likely hit me tomorrow (but I got an anti-nausea drug that I’m told lasts for four days with the chemo, and have Zofran at home for breakthrough nausea), and the joint pain maybe the day after tomorrow. Fatigue I already feel, but then I’m still a bit tired from the surgery, and was tired before the surgery from the blood loss.
Read the rest of this entry »
Comments Off
Death and Chemotherapy
Posted by Sappho on March 26th, 2012 filed in Daily Life
The cat, Fifi, died on Friday. She left behind Joel, me, her sister Boadicea, and the dog, Drake. The dog is probably the least perturbed by her death (though they were comfortable enough with each other to lie in the sun together).
Joel suspects that she had been sick for some time, but it all seemed to come to a head suddenly. He brought her in to the vet Thursday, for losing weight and sitting by the water bowl. The vet found that her blood sugar was quite high, but at that point we looked forward to years more life with her, with the help of insulin (cats, I gather, don’t usually get treated with oral diabetes medications). By that evening, though, she wasn’t eating, and so she spent a night at the emergency vet, and the next day continuing on IV insulin and fluid at the regular vet. Almost a full day and thousands of dollars after she’d first gone on kitty life support, her survival odds were said to be 50/50, her liver numbers sounded grim, and Joel made the decision to put her down.
We went back to the vet, and were led to a small room. On the wall was a cartoon of Hobbes sharing with Calvin some wisdom about death, and a poem in the voice of a pet assuring us that she was not really gone. Fifi was brought in, still on an IV, and crying. We pet her while the vet put the needle in, and Joel broke down crying. She was his favorite, the clever cat, who mastered the bell to go out before the dog did, and figured out on her own how to get Joel to throw a toy ball for her, and the sweet cat, probably the mildest tempered creature in the house (for Boadicea can be bossy, and Drake eager to show the big dogs he is tough, and both Joel and I argue more than Fiona). And Joel blamed himself for her death. If he had caught her illness sooner, if he had made different decisions …
Myself, I wondered whether she would have died had I not had cancer. Maybe so. Cats will not tell you their illnesses as people can, or even as much as dogs do. Perhaps half a dozen different people saw her, during those final days, moving around and eating like a normal nine-year-old cat, and suspected no illness. But, too, so much of the household attention has gone, these past few weeks (even before I was diagnosed, since I was still ill then) to my own problems.
Still, she is gone, and I am still here, so I prepare for the next step: chemotherapy. The surgery recovery goes surprisingly well; at two weeks after the surgery I don’t actually feel ready to drive (as I’d planned when I hoped to get the laparoscopic kind of hysterectomy), but I’m in little pain, and out walking every day. Menopause is, so far, barely noticeable, possibly because some of its expected symptoms (fatigue, anxiety, mood swings) aren’t, after all, all that distinguishable from what I’d be going through anyway from the cancer.
Last week at my post-op appointment I got to see the chemotherapy center, a set of lounging chairs in which women (all women at this one, since the practice is entirely concerned with gynecological cancers) sit for hours while getting the meds through IV. I also got a booklet describing what to do about the various side effects. You are advised to read only the sections for what you’re currently experiencing. Having disregarded this advice and read it all, I suspect that the reason for the advice is not just to focus your attention on just what you need, but also to get you not to scare yourself. The entire list is, after all, daunting, and I’m unlikely to get them all.
The treatment is called “sandwich therapy,” and it involves getting first chemotherapy, then radiation, then chemotherapy again, and then, if I’m lucky, a clean bill of health saying the cancer is gone and the opportunity to get more chemotherapy. The doctor calls this last part consolidation chemotherapy, and my mother calls it maintenance chemotherapy. I have a link to an article describing the treatment, as a way of getting successful treatment with fewer side effects. I will, I have been told, tolerate chemotherapy well. This probably doesn’t mean that I’ll actually find it altogether easy, but it does mean that I’m expected to be able to go through it without too serious adverse effects (not, at any rate, ones that would lead to stopping treatment), and that I’ll probably be able to work.
I also got, at my request (my mother wanted to see it), my pathology report, which describes the analysis of various specimens, the stage and FIGO grade of my cancer, the degree of myometrial invasion, and its type (endometrial adenocarcinoma, mixed endometriod and mucinous types). Reading the report, I half feel that I must have been careless to have developed such a cancer. But on the bright side, at least I don’t need to worry that the doctor was too knife happy, and took my reproductive organs in vain. The darn things were clearly trying to kill me, so good riddance to them. (I did, to be sure, lose a “Cervix with no significant abnormality,” but the uterus and ovaries could not have been kept.)
The cat, Fifi, aka Fiona Phosphor, died on Friday. She left behind Joel, me, her sister Boadicea, and the dog, Drake. The dog is probably the least perturbed by her death (though they were comfortable enough with each other to lie in the sun together).Joel suspects that she had been sick for some time, but it all seemed to come to a head suddenly. He brought her in to the vet Thursday, for losing weight and sitting by the water bowl. The vet found that her blood sugar was quite high, but at that point we looked forward to years more life with her, with the help of insulin (cats, I gather, don’t usually get treated with oral diabetes medications). By that evening, though, she wasn’t eating, and so she spent a night at the emergency vet, and the next day continuing on IV insulin and fluid at the regular vet. Almost a full day and thousands of dollars after she’d first gone on kitty life support, her survival odds were said to be 50/50, her liver numbers sounded grim, and Joel made the decision to put her down.
We went back to the vet, and were led to a small room. On the wall was a cartoon of Hobbes sharing with Calvin some wisdom about death, and a poem in the voice of a pet assuring us that she was not really gone. Fifi was brought in, still on an IV, and crying. We pet her while the vet put the needle in, and Joel broke down crying. She was his favorite, the clever cat, who mastered the bell to go out before the dog did, and figured out on her own how to get Joel to throw a toy ball for her, and the sweet cat, probably the mildest tempered creature in the house (for Boadicea can be bossy, and Drake eager to show the big dogs he is tough, and both Joel and I argue more than Fiona). And Joel blamed himself for her death. If he had caught her illness sooner, if he had made different decisions …
Myself, I wondered whether she would have died had I not had cancer. Maybe so. Cats will not tell you their illnesses as people can, or even as much as dogs do. Perhaps half a dozen different people saw her, during those final days, moving around and eating like a normal nine-year-old cat, and suspected no illness. But, too, so much of the household attention has gone, these past few weeks (even before I was diagnosed, since I was still ill then) to my own problems.
Still, she is gone, and I am still here, so I prepare for the next step: chemotherapy. The surgery recovery goes surprisingly well; at two weeks after the surgery I don’t actually feel ready to drive (as I’d planned when I hoped to get the laparoscopic kind of hysterectomy), but I’m in little pain, and out walking every day. Menopause is, so far, barely noticeable, possibly because some of its expected symptoms (fatigue, anxiety, mood swings) aren’t, after all, all that distinguishable from what I’d be going through anyway from the cancer.
Last week at my post-op appointment I got to see the chemotherapy center, a set of lounging chairs in which women (all women at this one, since the practice is entirely concerned with gynecological cancers) sit for hours while getting the meds through IV. I also got a booklet describing what to do about the various side effects. You are advised to read only the sections for what you’re currently experiencing. Having disregarded this advice and read it all, I suspect that the reason for the advice is not just to focus your attention on just what you need, but also to get you not to scare yourself. The entire list is, after all, daunting, and I’m unlikely to get them all.
The treatment is called “sandwich therapy,” and it involves getting first chemotherapy, then radiation, then chemotherapy again, and then, if I’m lucky, a clean bill of health saying the cancer is gone and the opportunity to get more chemotherapy. The doctor calls this last part consolidation chemotherapy, and my mother calls it maintenance chemotherapy. I have a link to an article describing the treatment, as a way of getting successful treatment with fewer side effects. I will, I have been told, tolerate chemotherapy well. This probably doesn’t mean that I’ll actually find it altogether easy, but it does mean that I’m expected to be able to go through it without too serious adverse effects (not, at any rate, ones that would lead to stopping treatment), and that I’ll probably be able to work.
I also got, at my request (my mother wanted to see it), my pathology report, which describes the analysis of various specimens, the stage and FIGO grade of my cancer, the degree of myometrial invasion, and its type (endometrial adenocarcinoma, mixed endometriod and mucinous types). Reading the report, I half feel that I must have been careless to have developed such a cancer. But on the bright side, at least I don’t need to worry that the doctor was too knife happy, and took my reproductive organs in vain. The darn things were clearly trying to kill me, so good riddance to them. (I did, to be sure, lose a “Cervix with no significant abnormality,” but the uterus and ovaries could not have been kept.)
Tomorrow morning, early, I get a port installed; then I go to the chemotherapy center to get my first treatment. Today I have been filling out forms, and filling out more forms, and paying bills, and making phone calls. And searching the net for accounts of just what it is like to go through chemotherapy, which may be even more unwise than reading the whole booklet on side effects, since most Internet accounts of chemotherapy appear to be horror stories. Here, though, is one of the less daunting accounts of what it’s like to receive chemotherapy.
Comments Off
Where I’ve been
Posted by Sappho on March 14th, 2012 filed in Daily Life
I have cancer. I’ve just had major surgery, and will be starting chemotherapy within the next couple of weeks. I expect to survive this, and I do expect to be back blogging, but blogging may be less frequent at times when treatment leaves me less energy.
I should, though, have time to do an African Ingenuity Blogwatch this week, sometime after I get home.
5 Comments »
A Lord’s Resistance Army round up
Posted by Sappho on March 10th, 2012 filed in Africa news and blogwatch
Uganda: Can a Viral Video Really #StopKony?
Uganda: Joseph Kony, the World’s Monster-in-Chief
Guest Post: Joseph Kony is not in Uganda (and other complicated things)
Stopping the LRA is not all about Kony
Central Africa: UN Maintains Efforts Against Lord’s Resistance Army – Senior Officials
Central Africa: Capturing Kony
Kony 2012 and the single story
UN fact sheet on the Lord’s Resistance Army and children
Comments Off
Being Salt and Light
Posted by Sappho on March 4th, 2012 filed in Quaker Practice
Someone from my meeting passed this on:
The theme for the Friends World Committee for Consultation’s 6th World Conference, being held in Kenya, is “Being Salt and Light: Friends living the Kingdom of God in a Broken World”.
All Friends around the globe are encouraged to participate by using the Study Booklet prepared for the conference. Go to the web site Saltandlight2012.org where you can read and download a free copy. Consider whether you would like to use all, or part of it, at religious education or in a dialogue group. Please note you can also join an online study group with Friends from around world. Check that out!
Other important web sites are: FWCCworld.org; FWCCglobalchange.org; fwccamericas.org.