There’s not much to write about around here, really. I’ve spent the last two weeks getting as much exercise as my body will tolerate, sleeping a lot, playing Fallout 4, eating, and trying to stay warm in this frozen hellscape we call Maryland. Today I’m gingerly working from home to prepare for next week, when I physically shuffle back in to the office. Yesterday we played an extended game of hooky for MLK day and saw Coco in the theater. I would recommend it to anyone; it was another great Pixar movie.
Today I ordered a shitload of tile for the upstairs bathroom. Now I have to figure out how to order the heating system we need. This will probably involve me driving to one of their dealers to advise me on the correct amount of materials; the heating unit uses one cable that snakes under the floor which has to be the correct length: it can’t be cut if it’s too long.
My cousin sent this to me last week, and I recognized the rig after seeing the custom rear bumper. It was featured in a build thread on the Expedition Portal that wound up lapsing. Now it’s being offered for $70-90K at auction. Unreal. There are things I would have done a little differently (the wheels sit strangely offcenter in the wheel wells, a casualty of the lift they installed) but overall it’s a nice build.
→ This is a syndicated post from my Scout weblog. More info here.
The first thing to mention is that my arms haven’t gotten any better. I’m four days in on new blood thinners but apparently this is going to take a couple of weeks to resolve itself: the blood thinners help my body break the clot down naturally, but slowly, over time. Which sucks. I can’t be depending on oxycontin to go to sleep (there’s a recipe for disaster) so we doubled down on an alternative method this evening, which I’d much rather use anyway to dull the pain.
We drove in to Hopkins for a follow-up with my oncologist this afternoon, and after going through the updates, he dropped a bombshell on us: he’s not recommending any further rounds of chemotherapy based on how the tumor came out during the surgery. His thinking is that the radiation had the main effect on it, but the chemo didn’t do anything–no shrinkage or necrosis as far as he’d been told–so there’s no point in more chemo if it’s not going to help me in any way. He’s going to huddle with my surgeon to make sure they agree, and then let me know by the end of the week.
If I could avoid more chemotherapy, that would be wonderful. It’s a hateful, boring, lonely, and withering experience. Again, if I didn’t have Jen with me for the first two rounds I’d have gone mad. They’re going to put me on a schedule of CAT scans every three months to make sure nothing is growing, and then slowly taper the frequency back over the years. We asked a ton of questions and I left feeling kind of shell-shocked.
Yesterday morning, we watched via FaceTime as my sister married her fiancee. They did a small ceremony with my Uncle Brian as officiant, which was full of laughter and love. There isn’t much more I can say about it other than congratulations!
Jen convinced me to visit the ER yesterday afternoon to have my arms looked at. The earliest my GP could see me was Monday at 5:20 and that just seemed too long to wait. We went to our local Hopkins affiliate hospital and were greeted with a small temporary waiting room jam-packed with people. They got me in for triage pretty quickly and signed me up for a sonogram, and then we waited for about four hours to have that done. That experience reminded me a lot of watching Jen get sonograms with Finley, except for the fact that it was me on the table and the nurse had the wand jammed up my armpit. She took a lot of pictures of my left arm (even though I’d told the nurse it was both arms they only wrote up the order for my left) and then they sent me back to the waiting room. We’d gotten there at 1:30 and it was almost 9:30 before we made it to the ER itself; at 10 a doctor appeared. Apparently there’s a bloodclot up in my neck that’s putting back pressure on the veins in my arms.
I’ve been using a blood thinner they gave me on discharge, but because it’s a subcutaneous shot I’ve had little luck administering it to myself. I go in at an angle with the needle and it fills a pocket of my skin up with medicine and then starts to hurt. I pull the needle out and all the medicine shoots out of my skin like a faucet. Rinse, repeat. It’s a pretty good bet none of the blood thinner was getting to me, but I was complaining about this in the hospital before they discharged me. They switched me over to an oral medication to get away from the needles and sent us on our way at 11PM.
A text conversation today with Mr. Scout reminded me that I wrote this back in July but never posted it. For posterity’s sake, here we go: I happened upon a new Scout to the neighborhood and stopped to check it out.
Looking it over, I noticed it was sitting on more street-focused tires mounted on stock rims, and I liked the look of them. I’ve been thinking for a long time about switching out the Mud Terrains I’ve got for something quieter and more comfortable, given that my driving is mainly on-road. It was for this reason that I bought a set of four wheels from Brian H. a few years ago–dry-rotted tires on a set of freshly powder-coated steelies.
My hope was to put a narrower set of tires on her, something with a smoother ride but equal height, but it’s impossible to find anything narrower than 11.5″ wide at anything above 29″ tall unless I want an even more aggressive tread.
This Scout is on General Grabber AT2’s at LT33X12.5R15, which is wider than I was considering but taller than I expected. His Scout was sitting on a comparable lift and the size in the wells looked right (I’m trying to avoid putting tiny tires on a tall truck). They are also reasonably affordable vs. comparable BFGoodrich or Goodyear tires in the same size. I’m not in a financial position to buy them outright, but I think I could sell the Mud Terrains on Peer Pressure minus rims and make some of that money back this spring.
→ This is a syndicated post from my Scout weblog. More info here.
Last night I got to bed at a reasonable hour, and lulled myself to sleep with a podcast. I slept for a couple of hours and then woke up to use the bathroom. By the time I’d laid back down my arms were on fire all the way up and around my shoulders. I laid there for about 20 minutes waiting for everything to stop screaming and then gave up and took an Oxy, the first of the bottle they prescribed to me. After another 20 minutes things calmed down to the point where I could relax and I fell back asleep. Today I made an appointment with my GP to figure out what’s going on with my arms, because this shit has got to stop.
In the shower, I took advantage of a long hot soak and peeled the majority of glue on my incision off. Yeah, gross. It’s been on there since the 22nd, and when it went on it was clear. By today it was, well, not clear, and had begun to peel off in places. Some of it was harder to remove than the rest, but after I cleaned out my bellybutton (they detoured around that when they opened me up) the rest was pretty easy. The incision itself looks like a picture of the San Andreas Fault from about 5,000 feet: it’s jagged and uneven and there are parts that bulge out and parts that bulge in. Certain sections are numb and others are hypersensitive, not unlike my forearms. Looks like I’m going to have a real pretty souvenir of this experience.
Jen and I did two laps around the Columbia Mall today and that felt good. It was warm, we were moving, and we didn’t have to stop every 2 minutes to look at something (ahem, Finley).
Amazing how the overnight appearance of 1″ of snow can shut schools down here in Maryland. All three of us are home in our PJs trying not to go insane. I’m happy to be home, of course, but I want to get the fuck out of this house. Jen and I have been making trips to the local mall and Target to walk around during the day, which has been good for me, just in terms of getting out and moving around, but after three weeks of inactivity, I feel like an eel trying to stand itself up straight.
My arms hurt more now than they did before.
New Years Day: I woke up at 8, and made eggs, bacon, and toast at 9:30 for the family. By 11:30 I was laying in bed again and napped for an hour. I had some lunch and then sat on the couch, sore, tired, and unmotivated. I don’t feel like doing a fucking thing. It’s too cold, I’m too sore, and I can’t really get up to much anyway. I’m not supposed to lift anything over 10 lbs., which is pretty much anything but a glass of water. Jen found a rice compress for my arms yesterday and I used that multiple times. It felt good for a while and then whatever was going on with my arms basically started ignoring it. More Tylenol, please. I have resolved that I will bundle up and get outside for a daily walk around the block or two, simply because laying around is just making me sore and bored.
We finished The Order of The Phoenix yesterday and celebrated by watching the movie over dinner. It’s amazing how much of the books had to be removed from the movies to speed things along, but I get it. 800+ pages of stuff isn’t going to condense neatly into a two hour movie. I ordered The Half Blood Prince from Amazon last night, as it’s the only one we don’t own, and we’re all itching to see what happens next. Meanwhile, the Ravens gave away their playoff hopes to the fucking Bengals. I’m glad I didn’t watch the whole game, honestly. I haven’t seen that many dropped balls since I taught Finley how to catch.