I was feeling so good yesterday that I went on another bike ride, this one perhaps biting off more than I should have, going all the way from our house on Grizzly Peak to the Berkeley Marina, and back, 13.7 miles, which isn’t much distance, but, with 867.6 feet of elevation gain on the way back, is a lot for a guy who has been on a bike five times […]
Well, technically we moved to Kensington, in a rental house a block and a half from the Berkeley city limit, which is just on the other side of EBMUD Summit Reservoir at the corner of Grizzly Peak and Spruce. Kensington, we’ve discovered, is like our old area of Larkfield/Wikiup; it isn’t actually a real thing, just an unincorporated part of Contra Costa County, served by what the French would call […]
Since I’m well into my CS50 Computer Science class (fighting the good battle with C), I figured I ought to be able to solve the recurring problem I’ve had on my site of pictures not showing up in posts — an unacceptable situation given that posting pictures was one of my main reasons for creating the site in the first place. So I researched and took steps to correct the problem, […]
I passed another milestone today. Last November, I got a new bicycle from a store in Berkeley to replace the one I’d lost in the fire. (This was courtesy of the remarkable generosity and kindness of my colleagues at Sonoma Clean Power, who collectively contributed to funding the replacement.) At the time I got the bike, my back and left leg were hurting from what I thought was a normal throw-out-my-back […]
Yesterday the staff at Stanford confirmed that my transplanted stem cells had engrafted into my bone marrow and were starting to produce new blood cells. The transplant worked. They unhooked me from the infusion bag I’d been attached to for 11 days (a great thing). Our next appointment at Stanford is Friday, and if everything continues on track, at that time they will release us from having to stay in […]
This will be a dull and simple post, because that’s the way my mind is right now, dull and simple. I never imagined I could feel this fatigued. It’s as if every bit of excess energy I ever had has been sucked out of my body, leaving only the small residual necessary to barely function: get up, walk around, eat (a little), shower, go to my Stanford appointments, read, watch […]
It’s a big day today, as I get the second of my large chemo blasts this afternoon. This second chemo agent is called Melphalan, and is the more toxic and side-effect producing of the two. So far I’ve tolerated the first chemo agent fairly well. My biggest complaint today is that my 24/7 friend the mini-infusion pump has blimped me up by adding 10 pounds of water weight, so I’m […]
From 7 to 10 days after a big chemo blast, blood cell counts hit what the doctors call “nadir” — their very lowest points. That happened for me 2 days ago (for my white blood cells, readings of 200, 200, 500, and 900 per uL from 7/7 to 7/10) and yesterday (for my platelets, readings of 30,000, 16,000, 9,000, and 16,000 per uL). These are expected, if scary-dangerous, readings. The […]
Thanks to everyone who left such sweet, kind, and supportive words in response to my post yesterday on Facebook. Some of you might be interested in hearing a little more about the specifics of the bone marrow transplant (BMT) I’ve started. The cancer I have (multiple myeloma) is a cancer that affects plasma cells. Like all blood cells, plasma cells are produced by bone marrow. The purpose of the BMT […]
Today marks a week that I’ve been off the chemotherapy drugs I’d been taking for four months, and I’m finally starting to feel more normal, almost back to my old self. I knew the chemo drugs were causing me fatigue (which is now thankfully almost completely gone), but I didn’t realize how much they were affecting my brain. As it slowly started to lift, I realized that I’d been living […]