SSS BLOG

A Little Bit about a Lot of Things

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Our Visit to “L’assemblée générale extraordinaire des copropriétaires du immeuble Apollo”

Sounds impressive, doesn’t it? In fact this flowery language translates as “The special meeting of the Homeowners’ Association for the Apollo building.” Much less impressive in English. (Our building is called Apollo because it was built on the site of an old movie theater with that name.) We couldn’t attend prior meetings of the HOA meetings for our building, because they’d been held when we were not in La Rochelle, […]

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Trump’s Dumb Treachery

Trump recently announced a “deal” with Putin’s Russia, under which the U.S. will ignore its own law imposing sanctions against Russia for invading Ukraine and purchase specified amounts of Russian diesel fuel. Ostensibly the reason for this “deal” (I use quotation marks because history shows that most of the “deals” announced by Trump never happen) is to reduce sky-high diesel fuel prices in the U.S. caused by Trump’s unnecessary, ill-thought-out […]

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Tombé

Trigger warning: May be TMI for some. Look at the map and pictures instead. Ooof … a bad day on the bike. Since Suzie was at the gym, I wanted to go on one of my favorite bike rides here, out to Chef du Baie and back again. By the time I got going it was 10:30, and the clouds that had brought rain and thunder during the night had […]

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Saturday at the Ile de Ré

Our friends Alain and Isabelle treated us to a wonderful afternoon yesterday at their house on the Ile de Ré. A delicious, long lunch followed by a short nap (!), then a walk on the beach and through the village of Le Bois Plage. Perfect weather, perfect company … elle est belle, la vie!

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We Made it to La Rochelle

TLDR: An easy trip, but some surprises awaited in La Rochelle. So, two-and-a-half long travel days. The first was an 11 hour overnight flight to Paris, which was bit delayed, but otherwise perfect. We’d sprung for business class seats, which meant that the food and service were excellent, and that it was possible to sleep acceptably well in the lie-down seats. We got to Paris at about 4 in the […]

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Back Home

Suzie and I are back home in Kensington and settling in after a lot of packing (mostly Suzie) and unpacking (same). It’s a glorious day here (75 and sunny) and we celebrated our return with a lunch at Barney’s on Solano with Suzie’s dad Paul, burger and fries while sitting outside. Yesterday we had a meeting with my Stanford doctor, and she had more good news. The results of the […]

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Death Death Death (aka Kappa Light Chains Take a Dive)

Excellent news today: Yesterday, unbeknownst to me, one of the blood tests done was measurement of my Kappa light chain proteins, which is the primary marker used to measure the amount of myeloma cancer cells I have in my bone marrow. My particular type of myeloma doesn’t put out as much of these proteins as normal, but nevertheless they can still be used to gauge the relative level of myeloma […]

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D + 27: Home in Five Days

If all goes well — and I have no reason to think that it won’t — we’ll be back in our own home in Kensington on Friday.

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D + 22: Slowly Better

It’s 22 days since I received the KLN-1010 infusion, 4 days after getting out of this hospital after being hit the by side effects described here. The good news is that each day I feel a little better, a little stronger than the day before. Tomorrow I’m going in for another series of blood tests. They’ll specifically be looking at the levels of my neutrophils and lymphocytes. Both are a […]

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D + 19: The Cancer Killing Begins

I’m out of the hospital after getting an answer to one of my pending questions: how long would it take the novel KLN-1010 product to turn my normal T-cells into cancer-killing CAR-T cells? The answer: About fourteen days. That was the delay between the date I got the KLN-1010 infusion and the date I started to experience the “Cytokine Release Syndrome” side-effects that result from my myeloma cells dying and […]

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