Yesterday, Needy Bastard, Today, One with What Is Often Conventionally Referred to as God, Tomorrow...

Lake County Mushrooms,
Dec 2011

I enjoyed reading the posts from Pasadini, Laura, and all the comments. Thank you all for reading this blog, and for your love.

Yesterday when I was with Misha (acupuncturist), I thought, she's going to stop liking me. I thought I might have been a little whiney about things. (Something similar today with David the oncology/chemo nurse also.) A flash of the thought, O dear I am such a needy bastard in pain today, all kindsa pain...After the acupuncture and going a chi gung class next door afterwards, I felt much better on all levels. Some of you are members of the Needy Bastards fellowship, in which case might get this more. (Here's that blog fyi, rather undeveloped, just like us.)

While lying there with the needles, I kind of moved away from visualizing light...Because of the radiation I think, which now that I think of it is essentially light, the sun being the major source of radiation. In any case, light feels too...dry, or hot. So I changed to something more watery, more earthy, smokey.


After chemo today, drove down to Santa Clara for internal radiotherapy. Suffice it to say, the fear was misplaced. It was the best thing ever! Why? Well, during most of the 4-1/2 hours I was there, my body was super relaxed, a state it has not been in for a long time...I felt no pain (also, been a while)...I felt utter contentment...mentally went through everyone I could think of and said I love you to each...at the same time, I felt very lucid. In short, I was doped up, but felt incredibly awake and happy.  

People Meditating on Geary Street

I had all sorts of things attached to me and tubes all over the place. I'm going to try to get a picture next week: three electrodey things on my chest to get heart rate, a blood pressure thing on my arm that automatically checked it/inflated every 5 minutes, a weird red neon thing on an index finger to check oxygen absorption, a catheter, a tube thing across my nose measuring CO2 (which I think means it's just checking to see if I'm exhaling, that is, breathing.) I was checking out the monitor much of the time. My heart rate was 60-something but went down. My blood pressure was about 110/60 and was going down below 100 but then shot up to 120 at the end when they did something I could feel. Oxygen 98%. They all seemed surprised (I mean there were 5 or 7 people around a lot of the time) when I would reply to things, and had my eyes open. I asked them if it was unusual and they said yes. They told me I wouldn't remember anything, but I think I remember everything. There were panels on the ceiling that reminded me of lying on the bench at Camp Double Bear and looking up at the sky. 

Crow leaving the roof

However even after spending 45 minutes in a chill out room, I couldn't walk. But by George I was in an excellent mood. My pelvis and possibly more importantly my feet were completely numb. Laura pulled up in front and Lee the awesome nurse wheeled me out and managed to get me in the car seat, where we proceeded to get take-out Chinese food (I hadn't eaten since the previous night) and eat it in the car (I couldn't get out of the car.) By the time we were back in San Francisco I could walk. It took a bit longer to wear off than they warned me about. 

The radiotherapy dosage today was the equivalent to what I get in a week of external radiotherapy. The device they used to administer it (Lee asked afterwards if I wanted to see it) looked like some kind of medieval torture device, covered with blood...it involved 14 long hollow needles, which were delivering high dose radiation (HDR) via things that looked like wires, directly into the tumor. The length of each wire changes during the 9 minutes of treatment. They were mostly invading the tumor which doesn't actually have any nerve endings/feeling, so this was apparently less invasive than a normal exam. But a lot of blood and piss are flowing from me now (I was warned about this), as the pain returns. The feeling of ground glass seems to alternate between three adjacent apertures...must talk to Dr. P about that tomorrow. Still, it was somehow a very positive experience!

Here's more about brachytherapy from Wikipedia.