Forgetting the patient is a person.

A lot has taken place over the last two days. I got back the CAT scan results over the phone from my oncologist and it showed likely NHL in my neck, though localized to just the area of the node and perhaps the right tonsil. I talked to my boss this morning who was pretty understanding of the situation, the truth is a lot of people have relatives who’ve experienced cancer and chemo. I then spent the bulk of the day at an ENT (ear-nose-and throat doctor) with my wife and new daughter trying to figure out what we were doing.

We got a few phone calls late on the 21st, but out of that we only knew we were going in for a biopsy, probably an in office procedure. We had a single warning about not eating anything or drinking after 7am. We got to the ENT doctor at about 10:00am and started filling out the ever present forms. Sometimes I’m amazed at the bad usability of these things, with a lot of repeat information, but that’s a topic for another day.

The ENT doctor had gotten us in quickly as a favor to my oncologist, but he was a little surprised we had so many questions since we never had an in person visit to ask anything. Eventually we resolved a few things and I decided since I most likely have cancer again that we would biopsy the neck mass and put in a cathoder like device under my collar bone. That’s when we learned it needed fully anethesized surgery at an outpatient place that we were scheduled for at 1:00. So it was off to the outpatient place next.

We got there and trucked ourselves in and started answering questions with the nurse. She was obviously of the stern/gruff variety or having a bit of a bad day. Typically Molly lightens people up, but she didn’t have much effect in this case. Anyway we’re plodding through all the contact information and medical history on the computer when we mention that there instructions that we’ve just seen say no food/drink after 12 midnite, but I had grape nuts at 6:45am for breakfast because they told us not to eat after 7am from the ENT office. Well that quickly led to the anetheseologist (sp) coming out and explaining that they couldn’t do the surgery because it had to be 8 hours or more since any solid foods.

All of this was a little frustrating, but understandable. The problem came with the two of us stressed out and they kept drilling us on not eating after 12 midnight as if I ate something on purpose. Micki is still in the pretty angry phase of dealing with the current crisis and she sniped back and the nurse tried a lame apology on the way out. It always surpises me when medical workers seem to have these sorts of personalities as people are dealing with sick or dying loved ones, and just simple courtesy would suffice. I see the same thing in many other places, but in the medical arena it’s just so jarring. I suppose it won’t be the last time, though the bulk of my experiences have been far more positive from the last treatment from watching a whole cancer center staff crying over the loss of one of their most spirited older patients that morning to a physician’s assistant who was almost overly helpful in prescribing any drug to numb the possible pain.

I told my team as well today, which is nice to have off my shoulders. I had to call a quick surprise meeting, and I think honestly a few off them were quite worried about layoffs. When you have bad news it’s best to just get it out there so people can deal with it. I’d probably have tried to spare them from knowing the details but with all the chemo appointments and hair falling out it’s not like you can hide being a cancer patient.

Anyway things will look better tomorrow and now I have a biopsy scheduled for Tuesday. Boy I so love that groggy/painful feeling of waking up from a surgery.

Clunky but useful

I spent a good portion of the last two hours working with Eclipse to setup a tutorial project I’m building. As usual I had to brush up on my command line CVS including how to login remotely via SSH. Then it was numerous attempts to create a clean directory structure in Eclipse. Unfortunately it continuously wants to move directories around or create duplicates. After some struggle I have it the way I want though I’ll probably end up using ant to do the builds anyway.

It was a pretty good day at work. Everyone’s still treating me pretty normal. After Wednesday things may be very different, but at least everyone will understand why I’ve been a little out of it.

Gutsy Fight

I just finished reading the cancer blog of Emma Candy, a 35 year old woman in England battling cancer. I recognize the sarcastic humor in her posts and her focus on the future, from my first bout with the disease. It helps to remind me how I’m facing the current possible relapse. If I end up having to do chemo again, I am so going to Disneyland real soon.

On a lighter note, I went to West’s birthday today. He’s four and one of the many C street kids. I spent about 30 minutes in a Blue’s Clues bounce house which Kassie just loved me for. I dropped my parents at the airport as well. Mom’s planning a celebration when this turns out to be a branchial cleft cyst.

Oh, the picture from the previous day’s post was sort of random. It’s from a overlook of a beach near Del Mar in San Diego where Kassie and I played while Micki was feeding Molly just before we made it to the beach this year.

Only 31 hours for a single bug.

Bug fixing on any project can be a very welcome experience, or on a project that generally isn’t going well it can be really rough. Unfortunately I’m on one of those spinning out of control projects with a failed history going back more than 2 years, so it’s not unusual to get a rough bug that takes hours just to research and replicate in a test. Anyway last Friday I started on a what looked to be a pretty easy bug and I finished it today after putting in 31 hours on it. I ended up writing about 150 lines of new code, but the bulk of the time was researching a host of problems with each attempted fix. Anyway I guess this isn’t really the point of this conversation.

The point is that when you can’t finish a bug at the end of the day and I spent Monday and Tuesday night this week in the office until 9:00pm it can be immensely frustrating, especially when your brain is constantly wandering back to the topic of whether the rather large growth on the right side of your neck is a cancer tumor or merely another branchial cleft cyst. Anyway it felt really good to lick this bug at 4pm today. Of course for the project we’re still falling a bit behind with all the new bugs, and I really need to spend a ton more time mentoring staff to really multiply the effort, but that’s a story for another day.

One tense moment today at 4:00 right after fixing the bug I called into my doctor’s office to see about the results of my PET scan. The nurse yesterday claimed they would send over the preliminary results, but they said they didn’t have them yet. So I’ll wait it out til Wednesday. Of course it’s not the sort of news you generally give out over the phone, but I was really hoping to get some clue about exactly what I’m facing.

Went to the movies with my parents, Sky Captain and the World of Tommorow. Quite good, not great but at least interesting and entertaining. It’s still really nice to escape once in a while.

Well, I went through a PET scan today. It’s apparently a little more advanced version of a Galium scan I got 4 years ago. Basically you get injected with some radioactive material and then sit in a scanner for quite a few minutes.

It really wasn’t too bad as these things go. After fasting all morning and drinking 32 ounces of water they set me up with an IV. As it turned out for some strange reason they wanted to inject on my left arm because my swollen node is on my right side, so they switched arms from right to left at the last second. The nurse remarked that my veins looked really good. They’ve come in handy as you get a lot of blood draws/injections with cancer and hunting for veins isn’t much fun. Apparently sometimes the chemo gives you weak veins, but I’m guessing that’s because a lot of people with cancer are older and didn’t have that great of viens to start with.

So they brought the radioactive sucrose and injected me. Then you have to wait for it to spread around the blood system, so you sit in the room in the dark. I brought a book, Enterprise Service Bus, with me, but apparently you just have to lay in the dark and do nothing, so no reading. After about 45 minutes they came in and led me into the machine room.

The PET scan machine includes a CAT scan with it as an all in one. I had to remove my wedding ring due to the metal in it which may interfere with the scan. They put you on the machine with an annoying neck brace and you can’t move for 45 minutes while they very slowly run you through the machines. Another exciting 45 minutes, but I bet you didn’t know that there are 142 holes in the speaker screen for the Philips PET scan machine.

Tommorow afternoon they can give me the feedback on the preliminary scan analysis. If it doesn’t light up, it’s probably just a branchial cleft cyst. If it’s not I’m about ready for another fight because the plan is still to make it to 101 and enjoy my great grandchildren. And I’ve got a great support network from Micki, Kassie, Molly, Kiwi, and Sophie to my Mom and Dad and all my brothers, Gibbscrew to Joan and Gary and a host of friends.