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        Christmas With Cancer, December 6 - 9 2013

            by Bob Stockton

December 6th:
It has been a couple of days since being discharged from my two day stay in the hospital  and my left arm proudly displays the bruises and hematomas for all to see. I am hoping for cold weather which will give me the opportunity to wear long sleeves but no such luck. While the rest of the country is freezing in defiance of Al Gore and the rest of the global warming nuts Florida remains toasty warm.

                    ***
The previous weekend was spent in and out of the Emergency Department at Baptist until someone finally made the call to find a room for me in the hospital and prep me for yet another cystoscopy. How many of these damned things will this make: six, seven? I’ve lost count but I am down to first names with one of the OR nurses (Linda) and I’ve watched another’s pregnancy blossom to the point where this time the baby has dropped and is in position. I wish her well just before the anesthesiologist piggy backs my fluid bag and I’m out.

I wake up in recovery to find that my Foley (I hate that man) catheter and irrigation bag have been removed. I’m feeling much better and am being visited by my uro oncologist Dr. Doug Swartz. He doesn’t seem happy, although that may just be the fog of the lingering propofol anesthetic. He tells me that the monster clots that have been blocking my bladder are from my prostate (!) and are a result of the last round of BCG treatment although he did find a small lesion (or something) in the bladder that he cauterized while he was in the neighborhood. The new plan is now to wait three months and then begin weekly treatments again, first with another damned cystoscopy then another treatment round at one tenth strength to see if that will not only generate the immune response against the tumors but leave me relatively clot free.

Again, I think that this is what he told me but I can’t be sure as I’m pretty groggy.

I must confess to mixed emotions about this: I’m happy to have a three month reprieve from treatment but dreading the thought of the next cycle.

The first night that I was admitted I prayed hard to God to see if He would get me through this round of clotting and blockage. I confessed my sins to Him and promised to seek His comfort and blessing. I can tell you now that God has kept his end of the bargain for now and I guess it is up to me to find a way to be closer to His grace. I don’t know yet just how I will do this but I guess I’ll begin by working toward being a less sinful person. I know that the mega churches and symphony orchestras that accompany the smiling and scrubbed happy faces and “praise God” utterances after every greeting are not for me, I’m too much a loner, have been all my life. Perhaps I’ll begin by speaking with Him alone and ask for guidance and direction.

                    ***

The first round of Christmas cards went out today. I’m not sure exactly what is wrong with the new novel I’m writing but I do know that it needs revising. I also know that I just don’t feel like figuring it out at the moment. My guess is that I’m a bit depressed but I’m not sure what to do about it. I’m sick of the “How are you feeling” questions that I get from just about everyone that I see who knows my situation. Can’t they understand that I don’t want to discuss this over and over. I’d rather just have the normal everyday conversation that people have in their lives.  I know that folks mean well and family have concerns about me but I’d rather not dwell on all this.

December 7th:
Pearl Harbor Day. I actually have an agenda today other than feed the dog and do some surfing. There are stamps to be purchased and more Christmas cards to mail. I’m also going to load three more disks onto the car’s hard drive so I don’t have to listen to the drivel that has taken the place of music on over the air radio and yes, even satellite radio (I’m keeping the satellite radio for the baseball broadcasts. Nothing quite replaces listening to two sharp announcers call a game on the radio). I drove over to European Street Café this afternoon in hopes of seeing a few friends and having a Diet Sprite (yes, Diet sprite) but there was no one there that I knew so I left and drove around a bit and listened to the music from my old DJ gig on the hard drive while trying to identify the musicians. I did better than I thought I would.

Tonight is the night that Jeff’s Mom and Dad are having their Christmas party in St. Augustine and I was supposed to go with Jeff and Pattie but seeing as I am peeing about forty times a day (too much information?) I begged off in favor of the recliner and a couple of really bad western flicks on cable. I can’t help but think what a great movie ‘Counting Coup’ (  http://amzn.to/1fPlLfP )would make but then again that’s what I’m supposed to think isn’t it?

December 8th:
Not much to do today other than surf and maybe catch the Jags game on the tube (oops, I mean flat screen. How old am I?). I’m not really a big football fan but whenever I see my son I have to have some common ground: He eats and sleeps jags football. I’m going to take a shot at caffeinated coffee today for the first time, maybe it will help my mild depression some. I’ll bore all of you with the results later.

 Well the caffeine seems to be working  - in more ways than one. I’ve updated my Fighting Bob promo on the 20+ author groups on Facebook and have posted the same to Twitter. I’ll probably pop over to Linked In a bit later and post as my guess is that Sunday is a good surf day for that network. This makes three days running for the Fighting Bob  posts so tomorrow I’ll run Counting Coup for three days after I come up with a different teaser for each day. All the links point to Amazon for anyone who wants to buy a stocking stuffer for friends or just a read for their own enjoyment.

The food order arrived yesterday from Omaha just after the wine order from WSJ so it was a busy half hour unpacking and putting the wine in the cooler and the food order in the freezer. After cleaning up I’ll begin addressing straggler cards for those who send me a card whose address I don’t have. Maybe later I’ll fire up the Cad and take a drive somewhere while loading in another cd or two onto the hard drive. A friend calculates that with 40 gigs I have room for about 100k cuts. I’ve only got about 225 loaded in so far and have a ton more to choose from, all music, no voice over.

Then again maybe I’ll just do a Sunday veg and watch some football/movies. How many days is it until pitchers and catchers report anyway?

As it turned out I just shut down the tv (sacrilege!) and broke out the Kindle and finished “Dinner With Churchill.”  It was a very good read.

Bowser is one smart dog. Last weekend while I was home in between the three ER visits I was limping around with the 3 port Foley and a leg bag while in a lot of pain from the blockage he never took his eye away from me. If he was asleep on his couch and I would move to get out of the recliner ( a journey in pain in and of itself ) his head would jerk up and he’d look as if to say “Are you ok, I’m worried about you.” I am, after all the one who feeds him twice a day. That being said he spent a lot of time lying on the floor as close to me as he could possibly get which was a comfort .

 I’ve been training  him to pee on the palm tree in the yard rather than on the grass and he has pretty much mastered it with the exception of the occasional lapse when I’m not by the door telling him to “go on up.” When he does hit the tree he’s rewarded with a treat, an event which he has very quickly internalized. Now whenever he’s in the mood for a snack he goes to the door and gives me the “need to go outside” look so I’ve become like Carlton the Doorman (you could Google it) letting him in and out every time he wants a treat. This is a dog that has been known to hold his water for up to 9 hours while I’m away!

It’s tough when the dog is smarter than the master!

Tonight’s dinner: chicken cordon bleu and a couple of those terrific cheese potato balls that Omaha does so well along with probably a salad. I’m thinking of trying a glass of sauvignon blanc to go along with it, my first taste of wine since late last month. If my liver does its job (all systems go there) it shouldn’t cause too much trouble for the bladder - I don’t think. Let you know tomorrow as I’m finished with this today.


December 9th:
I remember Christmas shopping with my mother as a little boy in downtown Trenton. The downtown area was a bustling economic center back in the day with department stores and other retail outlets lining the streets. Shoppers hurrying from store to store at Christmas time had their arms full of packages doing their gift shopping for the holidays. It was to me at the age of five or six an absolutely thrilling event and the most thrilling of all was visiting not only the large department stores like Yards or Nevius-Vorhees but also the old five and dimes: Kresge’s (now K Mart), Woolworth’s (R.I.P.), W.T. Grant and the host of specialty shops nestled in between.

In addition to the toys what I remember most are the pneumatic tubes. Back then there were no credit cards so the clerk would take the cash or check along with an invoice, stuff the lot in a cylinder that was padded on both ends and stick the cylinder into a pipe/tube. Whoosh! The padded tube would magically disappear, traveling along the pipeline God knows how to some imagined dark corner of the store where small, pinched looking men with green eye shades and sleeve garters - also imagined - would count the money and send back any change due along with a sales receipt. I’d stand there with Mom eagerly anticipating the magical return of the fuzzy cylinder, and then….the whoosh of the returning pneumatic tube and the crash of the returned vessel hitting the catch basket which announced the arrival of the receipt that finished the transaction. I swear I could have stood there and watched that magically disappearing and reappearing pneumatic tube all day.

I was reminded of this at 0330 this morning as I got up to make my visit to the bathroom. I had taken a glass of white wine with the previous evening’s dinner as an experiment to see whether or not the small amount of acetic acid by product which is sent to the bladder for excretion would cause any clotting problem. As you may have guessed a very small clot passed through the urethra which felt like a  small and malleable body and reminded me of those damned department store tubes that so fascinated me as a boy. I cannot say for sure whether the wine by product caused an irritation or whether the cauterized lesion gave up a clot - or both but for the foreseeable future my cherished glass of wine with dinner is on hold.

As Sheldon Cooper might say: Curses (my response was a bit more earthy)!

The lady that cleans the house comes today and she’ll earn her keep as the usual three week visit has been pushed back as a result of the previously described week. She’ll be ok with it as this is the time for her to get a Christmas bonus with her normal fee.

Most people are in awe of the science and engineering feats of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Men have gone to the moon, engineers and craftsmen have built one hundred thousand ton ships that manage to stay afloat, satellites have been launched that orbit around distant planets, all are marvelous accomplishments to be admired. My standard however, has been set much lower. I am in awe of the women who work in wash and fold laundries that can actually neatly fold fitted bed sheets. Much as I have tried this mundane task escapes me so every few weeks I gather my sheets from the laundry hamper and lug them over to Linda’s Maytag Wash and Fold where Linda and her minions wash, dry and perform this  miracle of dexterity for a nominal sum. I tip my cap   to them.

I have a four dvd course on the New Testament from UNF-Chapel Hill that looks interesting. It is probably an academic discourse but seeing as I am still undecided as to what is wrong with the new novel and how to fix it once I figure out the problem I’ll look into dvd number one today. Tonight I’ll continue the no tv thing and put up the Pandora stream ( Strauss waltzes ) and begin the new Kindle book on the Tudors.