Greetings from Boston - update

Hey, one week of treatment complete. Going home for rest on Sunday, then back on Monday, Sept. 9th for the second week which they say is a little tougher. Feeling very tired and will be nice to be home for rest. 

The Zocodover: a short interlude

Greetings to FIVE PLUS blog readers...

I thought as an entry before I am admitted into the hospital tomorrow for my IL-2 treatments I would post this excerpt of a still undefined work of stories and episodes set in Spain. Those pieces are loosely entitled Love in Exile. 

I hope you find some entertainment in this piece and feel also the deep attachment I have for Spain, to which I have been lucky enough to have traveled since 1981. This piece is still a draft, but it's shaped up enough for ya'll to read.

Well, enjoy, and you'll be hearing from me once I and, my wife, Terry are settled into the room that will be our home for the next week. Our companions will be boredom and monotony, but it's all for a good cause: me.

August 25, 2013, 7:56 PM.
Best to all who have taken the time to follow this blog and chosen to read the lines I have written about my journey this year. 

There are more stories to come, Tim

The Zocodover, Toledo, Spain

The stone canyons of the ancient city hold the dreams of Cervantes, an elusive memory in the chill of the Spanish night. Built, bombed, and rebuilt, brown, ochre, and gray, they shape the narrow ways before joining into squares opening quickly before falling back into the passageways between the houses, churches, remnants of old Moorish mosques, and Jewish Synagogues. One of those open spaces at the top of the city mound is the Zocodover, a bald spot paved with stone and lined with small trees and decorated with soft lights in the evening. Originally the ‘souq al dawad,’ it will always to be called a square no matter what its shape could have been; triangular, circular, fan, or rectangular, it is called a square and that is what the Zocodover is, a square, even though it is a not.

In the evening kids play soccer in the Zocodover. A place at peace with itself. The many cafes are quiet, the few tourists not so eager to sit in the chilly January air. Some cafes remain open, like the Toledo Cafe. The terrace is not big and glass partitions enclose its tables and chairs from the larger space of the square. The terrace is a comfortable place, even in January and even at night when the winter chill seems to spring directly from the old stone city. The terrace is home for couples, young and old, who find pleasure in talking, drinking wine, eating snacks from the kitchen, and they enjoy the sounds of the night: the chatter of school kids passing in small clusters and wandering off down some side alley or the clatter of dishes on the trays and the muffled shouts of friends recognizing one another across the square. The busy young crowd at the MacDonald’s just doors away from the cafe add to the low murmur of many voices as the square is populated. The rise and fall of foot steps pushing along the walk beside the terrace scratch and the clippy-clopping on the pavement punctuates the serendipitous sounds of the night. They all embrace the darkness, holding it captive.

A young woman bent over her knees studies intently her cell phone. She leans against her table, huddling up within herself while pounding out a text. She holds a cigarette in her thin pale hand. Studying the small screen, she returns to punching the little keyboard again. Consumed with her cryptic conversation she could be anywhere. The world around her has ceased to exist. Her inner voice spoke only to her conversation traveling down a long electronic tunnel. Waiting for the echo to return to her before she could shout into it again. She did so eagerly and punched her phone with a malice that left no doubt in her mind what it was she was shouting. Determined to make her point, each snap of her finger nail against the plastic confirmed what she said as the cigarette flicked mindlessly ashes onto her shoe.

The waiter slipped a small plate of salty chips onto the table in front of an old man seated at one of the tables. Then he disappeared and reappeared as he busied himself on the terrace. A couple nearby chatted incessantly. Forced and artificial laughter nearby came from a young man who was trying to seduce his date. From another quarter came soft admonitions of a mother talking to her child and behind them the rolling cadence of an old man boring his family with stories of no consequence, working the intervals of his narrative with his deep gravelly cadence, a man still panning for gold in the rivers of his vanity.

The waiter rushed by with a tray of small glasses of beer and half liter wine decanters clinging to the tray in desperation. The little terrace was filling and the chatter began to blend in to discord, an eddy of humanity trying to find a course toward something greater than itself.

The old man stretched and then recomposed himself. His soft white hair was thin and tailored neatly to the shape of his head and it marked his age from any distance. He studied the young man and the woman he was with. His energy was annoying to the old man as he watched the younger one try so hard to seduce his date. Unwilling to push others around with his memories the old man wanted only solitude to quiet his own mind. Quiet it from the hard memories of his own life. He was waiting for death patiently and deliberately. He felt no nobility in his patience, only the calculated understanding that it would happen sooner than later.

He still lived in his house near the Monasterio de San Juan de los Reyes. The Monasterio is elegant and peaceful on the inside, hard and determined facing the street. There in the old Jewish quarter of the Barrio de la Juderia of Toledo, not far rom the ancient Synagogues of El Transito and Santa Maria la Blanca left empty of Jews since their expulsion by Isabella and Ferdinand, the old man still lived. It was there in that quiet neighborhood the old white haired man and his wife had raised their family. 

His wife had been obedient to the dictatorship of their marriage just as he had been as a citizen under Franco’s regime. She cooked his food, cleaned his clothes, and walked with him in the evening, that long slow walk that couples take in the evening. The paseo. They would walk toward Iglesia de Santo Tome and quietly he would think about El Greco’s painting The Burial of the Count of Orgaz over the tomb of Orgaz inside the small church. He never went in to see it but he knew it was there and thought about it when he passed. It was a treasure of the city and he was proud of it, even though he had never seen it.

He rarely thought about what his wife was thinking. He knew she was but never asked what it was. It was not important to him. She would quietly walk with him as they would pass down Calle de Trinidad just north of the majestic Gothic Cathedral illuminated against the night sky. Inspiring, the tower hovered over the darkened streets of the city silhouetted against the blue ebony of the sky. It still impresses he thought when he could see it appear and disappear among the myriad views throughout the city. Then the old man and his wife of the Monasterio de San Juan de los Reyes would continue to walk up the Calle Hombre del Palo and Del Comcerio to the triangular square. The Zocodover. 
After some small talk with his acquaintances and perhaps a glass of red wine at one of the terrace bars when he would look anywhere except at his wife. They would return the way they had come and retire from the night. In the quiet of their home the sound of a drawer being closed, a door slowly being shut, a light being extinguished, a flush, the distant sounds of cars crossing the Tagus, or the random sound of voices somewhere down the street were reminders of the solitude of their lives even though they lived together.

The old man with the white hair of the Monasterio de San Juan de los Reyes still made the walk every evening and talked just as little as he had when his wife was there with him. She was dead. He was dead now he thought but alive to understand it. He was alone now he knew and when you are alone you wonder if you were ever not alone. You wonder if you were ever loved by anyone if they could ever really love you. He did not have the energy to seek new loves like the young man nearby. Being alone haunts you with what may have been. It is a quiet time when reflections stir the dust of untaken paths. Those ghosts convince you that you have lived a lost life and never taken the chances you should have taken and never let the love in when it was there in front of you. Somethings are meant to be he thought bitterly, but usually the reason for this is not found until long after the thing has happened, that irrevocable and ungracious coincidence of the end of life proclaiming its victory over time and events and sealing them regrettably within the limitations of the soul. The old man with the white hair revealed no emotion, showed no sign of regret, but he felt it deep within himself, in a soul that felt lost, that wondered if it had ever been loved. Being alone is like that. But then, he shrugged and his wonderment was lost in the forgetfulness of his age.

The old man of the Monasterio de San Juan de los Reyes cautiously observed the world around him. He didn’t know the world of the young man with his little black cap tight to his head who trying to seduce his date didn’t know that he tried too hard to convince the young woman that his energy was important. The old man listened, unmoved, staring blankly across the Zocodover lost in the memory of his life. Faint memories competing with the crowing of the young man.

He rolled his thumbs hard against one another.

The young man rattled on about nothing.

The old white haired man felt nothing but the lost sensation that was now an apparition against the knowledge of his limited world. He inspected the shaggy sideburns of the young man, his fidgety pumping of his cigarette as though a conductor of a great tobacco orchestra. Smoking can seem so seductive the old man thought distracted by the gentle rising of smoke through the terrace lights and into the darkness beyond, it’s richness drifting through the air like the details of a Velazquez painting; soft, sensual, serendipitous, and ethereal, like the slow movement of a loaded brush of gray pigment washed across the wet paint of the black sky. 

Crossing his legs the old man pushed his thumbs hard against one another. Emptiness filled him with a sense of want magnifying the void he felt. In the winter chilled blackness senses become sharper and they echo longer etching themselves indelibly upon the mind. Emotions are more precise and felt deeper but they become lost in the dark of the night like the transient beauty of dusk when the halo of the sun passes into the depth of night's envelope. Getting old is like that he thought. He sipped his glass of dark wine and then his hands again clasp each other, slowly, as though two actors in a silent drama, two companions in a life lived.

The waiter rushed back through the tables collecting spent glasses and plates, depositing small dishes of food and drink. A little world but he made it work for his livelihood. At the bar’s window he waited for an order to take onto the terrace. Even though January he didn’t need a coat, he was too busy and warmed by his job.

An old couple in the corner of the terrace smiled at one another. They had watched patiently as the hard blue of the sky turned a soft pink and then to a deep lavender on the fringes of the coming night growing inside it like the inside of a deep blue blossom closing around the earth until the black of night encompassed all. 

Dawn would come she knew and the unyielding sun would forge the world again sustaining her confidence in the continuity of the world and the hard task of living each day. The cycle seemed to explain to her the rational over the irrational, sanity over madness, passion over the indifferent. It defined the spectacle of life proclaimed without equivocation by shadow and light cleaved at the edge of black and white which was like night and day, heaven and earth, love and hate, life and death, one without the other seemed lost and lacked definition. It seemed at that edge, that brittle and ever changing boundary where the two meet, that was where the conflict began and as the light changed the war of one over the other seemed to be endlessly pursued as long as the sun had shone in the sky and men and women walked the earth. She thought these things as she sat there in the darkness of the Zocodover, the warmth of her companion a small reward for the youthful dreams she still wished would come true somewhere out there in the black of the night.

Her thick mink and her companion’s dark woolen jacket warmed them as they sat there at the terrace cafe. Happily they blew kisses to a friend across the terrace and waving a restrained gesture, tired peasant royalty. She dropped her arm and let it slip easily into his. Her companion’s red face alive with fulfillment, hers weary and relaxed. She drew her drink closer sliding it slowly and carefully across the table top. The thick burnt siena of her fur, the odd magenta mittens, the cream scarf, and the dark brown of her recently tinted hair framed the tight expression on her face. A diffuse halo glowed around her head, created from the cafe lights and held her captive like an aging courtesan receiving the gift of annunciation from the sorrowful maidens of the night. Her lenient, weathered, and aged skin marinated by the truculent reality of life like the winter fog that often lay over La Mancha. It lay close to the earth pushed into the low places by the sun overhead concealing the rows and rows of vines, olive trees, and fruit orchards, as does age conceal the memories of passion and defeat, the growth of things and the death of others. The sun soaking through the haze, an intruder, a reminder of the large world beyond the white mist of old age but held back by the circumspect wall of fading reflections.

The old woman’s cheeks blushed unevenly with a soft pink as the blood rose to warm the chill and her glassy dark eyes possessed melancholy in a way that only an old woman’s eyes can. Held open with determination she looked out at the world through two small glimmering orbs that had studied the plain needs of her life. She griped firmly her lover’s arm knowing they would sleep together this night. She felt rewarded for a hard life because she knew he loved her. She knew he had always loved her. He loved her before she married another man. He loved her after she was married and he loved her now as a widow. He loved her before he knew her because he loved her in his heart knowing that she was to be his sometime during his life. He always loved her and she felt rewarded to be loved. He beamed with gladness to be here with the woman he loved so long. To have her arm slip into his and to feel her pressure against him and to know that he would sleep with her this night. He loved her and his faith in that love had been rewarded.

The night lost its cold edge. The lights seemed a little brighter as the laughter of the young became a light choral above the low resonance of older voices, two ends of the arch of life.

The old man of the Monasterio de San Juan de los Reyes unmoved, only occasionally turned his head and calculatingly taking in the vibrant life around him and the small bit of wine he had in front of him. He changed the position of his legs recrossing them in a self-conscious gesture, slowly as though a ritual. When people age their mannerisms age with them. Gone is the energy but still the slow movements of the limbs follow the same path they have for decades like a dancer in pantomime redefining the small space within which they move, slowly and circumscribed. 

He coughed.

The old man of the Monasterio de San Juan de los Reyes wished that he had a woman to slowly slip her arm into his, to say she loved him in a way that he knew it was true and not an obligation. That time had passed and he knew it. He just wondered if he ever had been in love. He wondered if he cared at all. It is only when one gets old enough to fill that expectation of love with a full dose of affection that true love blossoms he thought quietly. Those eager feelings of youth that drive people together like colliding stars in the hope of becoming greater than themselves, hoping to create an entirely new universe that is only a preamble to the path that leads the lucky few to the enriched happiness of loving someone beyond those expectations. The old man felt he had failed and he knew that he would never find the answer to his questions. He just sat and watched the world around him and wondered how he had lived such a life, a life that now seemed so empty. He wondered that and felt again the loneliness in his heart.

The waiter looked around. The white hair of the old man had just been an apparition and the vision was lost in the many small carnivals of life that sat at the terrace tables. The small groups left and the evening took on its age with dignity. 

Deep in the mix of alleys that crisscrossed Toledo the old man and woman who had sat in the cafe were walking to their home. In the slow movements of a dancer Don Juan stepped in front of the woman and slowly they danced a few shuffled footsteps into a darken doorway. The soft magenta mittens embraced him as he lay his hand on her cheek, kissing her on the mouth with what was left of his youth. She kissed back and for that brief moment they loved one another in a way that few people ever will.

Chemo versus immunotherapy - Re-Post

What is the difference between chemotherapy and immunotherapy? 

By: Robin Geller

Chemotherapy is the use of drugs and other toxins to kill tumor cells. 

Actually most of these compounds are designed as metabolic poisons to kill 

any rapidly dividing cell, normal as well as cancerous. That is why 

chemotherapy patients often lose their hair and have skin and digestive 

problems during the course of treatment; hair, skin and gut epithelium are 

all rapidly dividing cells. 



Immunotherapy on the other hand, includes a variety of approaches designed 

to augment or redirect the body's own immune system to destroy the tumor 

cells. The immune system is extremely specific and when these approaches 

work they are able to target just the tumor and not normal tissue. 

However, most tumors have developed mechanisms to avoid detection by the 

immune system so it often takes a great deal of effort to get immune cells 

which can effectively identify and destroy the tumor cells. Drugs and 

other compounds are used here,too, but they are designed to act on the 

cells of the immune system in order to activate them, they do not act on 

the tumor cells directly.

Of Trips, Travails, & Tribulations - a journey to aisle two

I am about to set course on another Odyssey that life has thrown my way. 

Like the indifferent and capricious gods of ancient Greece who tormented humanity with their controlling games of hubris and self-indulgence, I - like many - suffer the trials of survival and the pains of illness until the gods decide to shine on me and make me well again.

For people in ancient Greece, they suffered the willfulness of the fates and lived out their lives as best they could, hoping that their offerings, tithing, and sacrifices to the gods would help them be more successful than say, the town just down the coast of one of the most beautiful places on earth.

For the modern person, the fates are a delusional excuse to blame something or someone else for the misfortune that seems to be thrust into our laps, or in my case, in my torso in general. But someone's gotta do it, so it's my turn on the merry-go-round. Although I have had a couple of turns...

Maybe if I had sacrificed that cat in 1965 by flinging it off the bridge, instead of letting it go, the fates may not have sat around cogitating what particular pestilence they would send my way. Because, really, the fates don't like cats in general and must have seen my release of that particular cat as the basis for thousand more cats that now run free in the world. 

Spay or neuter my friends. 

Let me re-phrase that, Spay or neuter your pets, my friends. There, that's better.

I have had many misfortunes in my life (but haven't we all), and one always wants to know what they could have done earlier that may have set a different course. 

Like Odysseus when he left the fateful shores of Troy after the battle to wander for years until he could find his home again, he must have wondered why, and not just ascribed it to which god in the Pantheon of Greek gods that might be toying with him. 

And, more than likely when he had to tie himself to the belly of a sheep to save himself and his crew, which some people do for their own enjoyment, a question mark must have wrung somewhere in his mind, thinking, maybe I should not have gone to Troy in the first place, but just stayed home with Penelope and enjoyed the fruits of my island. Sort of what we feel collectively as a nation about about sojourn in the arid and mountainous climes of Afghanistan. 

But once he sailed, the gods were at play and the winds of the fates blew hard against all the Greeks for the fortunes they would achieve or loose in the dark corners of their ambition to seize Troy and Helen, and then return home for the temporal honors they would achieve. 

Achilles would not make the trip - he had an achilles problem. 

But, Menelaus would return with the fickle Helen (was it just her looks or was she really good on the old sheep skin sheets that caused a thousands ships to sail?) and Agamemnon, who would return to Mycennae the King of kings of the ancient Greeks to buried in a tomb with the riches of his time buried within.

Poor Odysseus however, was cast away from Greece and was lost across the sea for years fighting the delusions of his soul and overcoming the mysteries of his beliefs to finally return home. 

The Cyclops, as strong as he was, was blinded by his own ambitions, if not Odysseus's spike, and failed to see anything beyond his own greed and meanness. And once Odysseus had given up his name to the one-eyed Polyphemus, Poseidon caused Odysseus to wander even further into the darkness of his misfortunes, to encounter the witch Circe and other obstacles that slowed his progress home.

There's always someone to blame and why not the gods.

But, Odysseus made the trip, and finally, having been given a leather bag full of all the winds, which I usually gather after a meal at On the Border (a Mexican Restaurant), he was able to navigate and scramble across the sea to his home island propelled in part by a strong rear wind.

Home at last! Home at Last! he said as he made his way up the hardscrabble beach of his island.

My ship sails on this voyage on Monday morning. I am packed and ready to go meet the Lotus Eaters of my time and to loose my mind in the toxic wonderland of the drugs they will give me. 

I am also ready to continue the journey and find myself on some Greek island sometime in the future, basking in the warm sun of Odysseus, when and where I will shout to the gods, Home at Last! Home at Last! you motherfuckers!

NAZCA LINES & a night under the stars

The Nazca Lines are a series of ancient geoglyphs located in the Nazca Desert in southern Peru. The high, arid plateau stretches more than 80 kilometers between the towns of Nazca and Palpa on the Pampas de Jumana about 400 km south of Lima. Scholars believe the Nazca Lines were created by the Nazca culture between 400 and 650 AD. The hundreds of individual figures range from simple lines to stylized hummingbirds, spiders, monkeys, fish, sharks, orcas, and lizards.

The Monkey

A little known Northern Hemispheric occurance of this type of phenomenon are the Norris Lines.

As the host of these lines I have been studying the mythic usage of the NAZCA desert and how these lines and shapes and, you know, just what happened there. 

You may have seen these lines on any number of TV shows that talk about Aliens from other worlds, unlike the aliens we already have on this world. The other planetary aliens come to visit us and use these lines as a method of aerial positioning, sort of like an extra terrestrial landing guidance system. (Aliens already here can be found at Walmart, just to say...)

We won't go into the logic of Alien space travel because it would seem that if we, or any other life in the universe could build a space ship to travel here or there, we would already have thought about a landing system that could get us on the ground that might be a bit more sophisticated than the scratched earth images of hummingbirds or monkeys. But, there it is. 

I look down at my chest and study the NORRIS LINES and wonder if Aliens, because I was asleep during the operation that created these lines, didn't map out on me a new landing zone for their coming. I am highly suspect that we humans could not do such a thing, because we seem so unable to accomplish other basic tasks, so Aliens must be with us and guiding the more complex endeavors we undertake.

So, the other night while my wife slept, I went outside and lay half naked (top half, I did have my shorts on) in the street in front of my house, under a street light so the NORRIS LINES could be adequately seen from say, a light year away by any Alien looking for a place to touch down on earth. The NORRIS LINES, go this way and that, straight up, and straight across, with a few punctuated marks in the middle, and seem to be a written language in a script unknown on this world.

As the stars moved slowly overheard, I wondered about Annie, my Bouvier, and if once the Aliens came and landed on my chest, which has as many zig-zags and notches in it as the Nazca desert, and if once the Aliens took me away, if Annie, suffering as she does with living under the mantel of Dog years, would be able to transport through space with me. 

You know, the whole Dog Light Year thing. Touchy ground there for space travel and I understand that NASA is still trying to figure that out. I don't know anyone at NASA, but with such an Einsteinen type of theory to be reckoned with, you just have to figure they are working on it.

So as Annie sat at the door watching me, and probably wondering in her dog mind just what was it I was up to, I remember the Emerson quote, "If a man would be alone, let him look at the stars."

Nazca, Peru - Space Alien?

Time to make the donuts

I have been back to work now for four days, and looking forward to my Friday tomorrow. So, one more week and two days of work before I start my ordeal with my little friend, known in many circles as Cancer.  He's a pesky little fucker and while he, or she, don't won't to be sexist about it, continues to live quite comfortable in my chest, I think now that I have survived my surprise cardiac episode, it's time to turn my attention to my renal cancer.

As I mentioned early on in this blog, the IL-2 (aisle-two) treatment has been very successful for many patients and my expectation is that it will be again for me. But while I am sitting here at my work place, and hoping for a few moments  of solitude, someone on the other side of the wall is using a drill that sounds like a huge dentist drill for elephants. Well, anyway, a little inconvenient, but I'll survive. And, that's how I feel about the renal cancer. OK, more than a little inconvenient, more like an ordeal, but one I believe I will get through successfully.

I listed under pages a good  description of IL-2 published by NIH and it explains clearly what it is, what it does, and side-effects a patient is likely to have. As I have gone down this path this year I think  many have wondered what it is I am doing. Chemo? Radiation? all the normal choices that generally swim through the consciousness of what cancer treatment is. In many ways I am lucky to have had renal cancer...although saying that seven years  ago  when it tried to kill me, and  was within its grasp, it didn't and I have lived with the idea of cancer for those seven years. But, renal cancer has many good treatments, of which IL-2, for those fit enough and crazy enough to subject oneself to it's own unpleasant journey, has the effect of managing the illness effectively. And, as I have told my Docs on many occasions I know  at some point something will kill me, like those tractor trailers that sometimes try to jump into my back seat on the way to work...but otherwise, I do not want to die of this, and my focus is to defeat this  cancer and live with the aftermath of it's unseemly bond with my life.

Did I say inconvenient?

Well, just a few thoughts as my countdown to August 26th ticks along. Hope all are well, tim

2013: History of Stuff

Well, as I come to the end of my cardiac issue, meaning that basically while I am not 100 per cent I am going back to work this Saturday. And, like any significant change life and the emotional and intellectual world that populates that life needs to have some house cleaning done.

As many of you know, this has been an interesting year for me, my family, and my friends. Not only did I begin the year knowing that something was wrong with me, and trying to convince my doctors who did their best to prove that nothing was wrong, I am eight months into this year proven correct that how I felt was an indication that something was not right in Tim's world.

Last December, my Primary Care Doc did every blood test known to man and they all came back negative. Diagnosis at the time: mild depression or seasonal depression.

In February I saw another Doc, the Doc who original exercised my cancer from me seven years ago, and we chatted about how I was feeling. He too, concurred, without any evidence or presentation of symptoms that I was suffering some mild depression and perhaps the seasonal thing was the culprit. Although it didn't explain the 50 plus other seasons throughout my life through which I navigated without depression, but these were learned men and really had my best interests at heart.

So in march I was due for my yearly C-Scan, of which I have had 15 plus over the past seven years, and that's not counting the ones I have had this year and the ones I will have later this year for which I might be lighting out like the Northern Lights this winter. Anyway, I get the scan and I get a call from my oncologist to come in for an unscheduled visit: never a good thing. He shows me the scan of a lymph node about 2-3 times as big as it should be right in the center of my chest, just below the branch of my wind pipes as they go off to each lung in turn.

Fred, who is my Doc, says, this node is too big and we need to go in and see what it is made out of. And after going over the different scenarios I am convinced as this little bugger had been my nemesis all along and causing my general feelings of malaise. So, we set up an appointment for another set of Docs to do the test, surgical procedure that goes down your throat, and with an ultrasound attachment locates the test area and then proceeds to extract a sample.

Cancer. Fuck.

Well, I felt like telling everyone that I told you so, but realizing that now I had a new course from those things I thought I would be doing this year, I held my cards in check and fastened my seat belts for the next part of the plan to develop.

Fred informs me that I might be the perfect candidate for a treatment plan at BIDMC. IL-2. And his office hooks me up with the BIDMC staff, and after an interview, they schedule me for my preliminary screening, which is just about everything. MRIs, C-scans, Stress Tests, and somethings I don't even remember, other than it took all day.

Jim, my new Doc at BIDMC then calls me and says they have found something in the stress test results that may not allow me to participate in the IL-2 program. Damn, and I thought I was getting the silver bullet. But, with another screening, a profusion stress test, they could get a clearer picture of what was wrong with my heart.

So, I show up at the appointed time, they inject me with some radioactive dye and have me do the stress test all over again, this time they take pictures of how the dye is moving through my arteries and around my heart.

On June 3rd I meet with my cardiac Doc, Doogie (his last name is Hauser) and he shows me the pictures that indicate that the bottom part of my heart was not lightening out, meaning that blood flow was not getting to all areas of my heart. We talked about what that meant and also the possibility of a stent, which Jim, my BIDMC oncologist, had said would allow me back in the silver bullet program, IL-2. So, I am all in and then we discuss where to have the procedure done, and I said, because the looming cancer treatment was waiting in the wings, if you can do it this week or next, I'll have it done at BIDMC, thinking if I transfer to Maine Medical Center, I'd have to redo many of the tests, thus delaying my procedure.

I show up on June 7 for the...what I think is going to be a stent or two, and they roll me into the procedure room. The Docs are chatting away and I am able to see some of what is taking place on a TV screen, and then the voices change and for the next few minutes they are saying things like, look at this, and so on...then abruptly the head Doc walks over and says that they are admitting me because my heart looks like the LA freeway at rush hour. Nothing is getting through and only surgery will fix it.

June 10, I am second up for surgery, and they do the deed, cracking me open, re-plumbing the heart, and slam bang, thank you Tim for your contribution to the medical profession and their continued training in cardiac care. Home by Friday, and since, I have been pushing myself to improve my stamina and strength so that I can be where I am today, ready to go back to work. I am currently walking 3-4 miles a day, although later in the day I have a few moments of feeling tapped out, it's all a matter of time before stamina is back to normal, except for this little speed bump coming my way.

On August 26 I will again find the hospitality of BIDMC in my headlights. I go in for the much awaited IL-2 treatments. The side effects are not pleasant, and everything from flowers to small children are prohibited from the care unit that I will be in. IL-2 has some pretty funky side effects, one is that the surface of the body becomes very susceptible to infection, my mind might become a bit toxic, (been down that road before) as well as the body in general, as well as other side effects that are flu like. They recommend that you bring your own toilette paper, if you get my drift.

So, back to work and then back to BIDMC...will update and blog more now that the computer is coming back online. 

Hummingbird Moth clearwing Gardiner Maine Aug 2011

Saw this moth in my neighbors back yard yesterday, very cool. I didn't have a camera but found this video on youtube.