Nothing a little escapism can’t cure.

My wife questioned me a few times today about how I was feeling. I answered, “I’m fine.” Truth is as she recognizes well I had the blahs. Waiting for a diagnosis is in some ways harder than having it. I’m ready to fight, itching to organize and strategize the road to a recovery, but I still don’t know what I have. The growth on my neck might just be a branchial cleft cyst left over from the womb. The problem is it’s probably not and I really want to know so I can prepare. I’m ready to fight off the lymphoma again.

In some ways it will be easier this time and I’m trying to stay focused on those. I know to stay away from compazine like the plague. I know how to chop up prednisone and fit it into organic health food capsules so I can get it down without tons of sweets and the occasional vomiting episode. I know that the chemo doesn’t totally floor me and that just focusing on the normal things and work isn’t going to be impossible. Still it’s the new hard things that worry me like if I can handle sucking on the ice for the shots where you keep your mouth cool. For some reason I just can’t stand this, I get really naseuous. I haven’t had a popsicle in 4 years. I think the most worrisome thing is explaining things to Kassie. She escaped the whole espisode in the womb last time. At 4 I don’t think she’s really ready to understand cancer and mortality. I just want to grow old and watch her and Molly grow up and take trips to the beach and Disneyland with my grandkids. There’s always challenges.

Anyway Micki finally got me out of the house to see Spiderman II in IMAX. It helped pretty much cured the blahs. Movies can really do that for me. Now I just have to stay concentrated at work tomorrow.

Just a little swelling

It’s been a long few days. While on a trip to my friend Joe and Ghen’s wedding in Toronto I realized I had a lump on the right side of my throat. The last time I found a lump on the other side was in March of 2000 while working all night to redo the corporate website for xuma.com. At first we thought it was just a branchial cleft cyst. My mom has a lot of cysts, all of them benign so far so it seemed reasonable. Only after the surgery to remove it did I learn it contained cancer, more specifically Non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma.

I remember the experience pretty vividly, as I was scared to death yet strangely confident that I could beat it along with the stats that 80%+ in my stage were treatable with no relapse. The oncologist confirmed it was likely cancer again. I have a PET scan to confirm that suspicion. I’m still scared and worried about my girls. I really love watching them grow up and I don’t want to miss anything. It’s the waiting not knowing what the ensuing battle will be which sucks at this point.

I can’t even share the experience with anyone but Micki at this point, so this blog will remain hidden until I know more. I’m worried a lot more than I’m willing to admit to anyone at this point.

From web development scripting languages to the current leading object oriented language

I’m embarking down the road of a challenge I’ve been seeking for some time. I get to move a large web development team with a background in client server, mainframe, and coldfusion into the java world. To add to the migration I get to teach them, iterative agile methodology, test driven development, and a host of open source tools from ant to cruise control. Despite the challenges I think I can actually pull it off. Now I just have to start to develop course materials and mentoring. Six of them underwent Intro to Java just last week. Look for more entries related to simple initial projects here.

The 1.0 release must be better

I really like the idea behind maven. Basically it’s an automated make tool that avoids the lenghthy configuration you can get into with ant. There’s only one problem. It seems to be incredibly buggy.

I tried maven quite a few months ago, but I had trouble even getting it to load dependent libraries over the net. Eventually I got fed up and gave up. Then since I saw the 1.0 release I thought it might be worth another shot. An hour or so later after trying to setup a simple ‘cactus:test’ I couldn’t get past target not defined errors and I just gave up again. Maven just isn’t there yet. You can really tell this when you try to look for help. After 30 minutes on Google I came up with nothing. Nuff trouble, I’ll stick with ant and it’s big configuration files.

Why I don’t like popsicles

I sent a little donation to a cancer patient today. It started with a casual browsing of <a href=http://wilwheaton.net>Wil Wheaton’s</a> site. He’s a alpha geek type who is best known for being the whiz kid on Star Trek the Next Generation, Wesley Crusher. Strangely enough my favorite newsgroup in the very early 90s was alt.wesley.crusher.die.die.die.

I saw a <a href=http://www.wilwheaton.net/mt/archives/001527.php#001527>post</a> on there from his wife about a their friend, Kris, who was diagnosed with lukemia not too long ago and is now undergoing her final treatment cycle:

For the week prior to her stay at City of Hope, Kris was taking anti-seizure medication and going to her doctor to do chemotherapy tests before beginning her intensive treatment. When she begins her stay on February 13, she will be doing several days of chemotherapy followed by several days of full body radiation therapy. Then they will transplant the stem cells they harvested from her (she was not a match with her brother, children, or the National Donor Registry). This option gives her a better chance of her body not rejecting the transplant. Then the slow recovery begins.

I read the entire post and immidiately tears welled up and my hands shook a little. I have the statistics for my own NHL battle firmly planted inside my head. 80% chance of a full cure for the first round of chemo and radiation treatments. If it does reoccur it is likely to come back within 5 years and then the treatment is transplanting bone marrow and the survival rate is 50%.

I sent them a small donation. I really hope she makes it, the support network helped me a ton, in fact my wife Micki saved my life during the worst part when I had a severe allergic reaction to compazine and my throat started to swell shut. My parents, brothers, the Gibbscrew network of friends, the people at my company, and a horde of others all let me know in various ways that they would help in any way they could. I still remember some little things like my brother and sister in law buying me an O’Reilly book of all things on Non-Hodgkin’s Lymphoma or a project manager from XUMA pulling me aside and urging me to fight it all the way and not to give up because he had watched his Dad give up after the diagnosis and pass away soon after.

I still politely turn down popsicle offers from my daughter, Kassie. I had popsicles, Otter Pops actually, during the chemo treatments at the Nevada Cancer Center. I don’t touch them anymore. Some day I’ll have to explain why I hate popsicles to Kassie.