itch is back

Very itchy day today. Doc said the itch is a reflection that the treatment isn't working but he'll give it one last try. So I got this for the next two weeks. Vewry itchy. I wonder if I'll sleep tonight. Out of oxycodone. Not like that helped.

I'm afraid of falling asleep

I haven't been in a good way since we last posted. I got sick and couldn't get rid of the cold. It lasted a couple of weeks. I was sick through chemo treatments.

Then my B symptoms started up. B symptoms are the type of side effects for people with Hodge type B. That's the bad hodge. And usually the onset of symptoms is a bad thing. It means that the cancer is growing more aggressively and is all over your body in big chunks. It basically feels like the cancer has taken over the majority of your body. I'm supposed to see my doctor on Monday. He doesn't have office hours on Monday but he's coming in to see me. He's also bringing his second in charge and my whole team. They've had meetings about me. 

Believe it or not, I have been too overcome with B symptoms to even worry about the latest progression of cancer. These "symptoms" are basically side effects from the cancer. Easily the worst is the itch. Now, I know that would surprise you. How bad can a little itching be? If only it was a little itching. Every day, every second, I itch all over my body. It's not like a skeeter bite, either. This itch starts with a shock to the skin, much like a knife tingling and then an unrelenting urge to itch. And it happens constantly and completely randomly throughout my body. So if you imagine that my body were a Christmas tree with random blinking lights, that's what's happening every second of the day and night. It is hell. 

The doctors keep trying different steroids but none are working, which isn't a surprise. The docs basically will tell anyone that nothing alleviates this itch. Remember the good old days when I can just pop an oxycodone if I wasn't feeling well? I tried. I tried really hard. I popped a lot of oxy and it doesn't really do anything.

This morning at 5 am, I had a marvelous conversation with a guy at the drive through at McDonald's. I was on benedryl, steriods, sleeping pills, oxycodone and hydrocodone. But I was wide awake because I was itching all over, much like the many nights before. During this, the itching stopped. It was an unbelievable feeling. Peace. I ordered my breakfast burrito and the itch soon came back, faster than the breakfast burrito came up. 

Now the second of three main B symptoms have started. Night sweats. Because cancer now owns your body, it fucks with your temperature. Some older women have described it as the worst, most hyperactive case of menopause. While you're overcome with this itch, a wave of heat from within your body will blow through you. You sit and sweat for ten minutes. This happens about every hour or so. What you have left is one really slimy body. 

The first inclination would be to take a shower to help with the temp and itch. But the water hitting your body stings like knives even more. Plus, your temp goes up so while you're trying to clean your body, at the same time, it's sweating.

Right now, it's midnight and I need to sleep. I'd like to tell you more. Like how, for instance, the treatment leaves my feet in constant pain and my hands always tingly. Once a day or so, I cramp up somewhere, in the hands, feet, leg mostly. And because my body is losing a war inside, I have no energy to do anything on the outside.

When I was in pain previously, I go to bed. But I am so afraid of what happens when I wake up that I would rather go back to the McDiddies at 5 am again to talk. If I end up sleeping, in a couple of hours I will wake up sop and wet. The sheets will be wet, there could even be a puddle. My shirt is wet and I'm freezing. These are the night sweets. 

At this point, I lost the benefit of being able to completely sleep. So I slumber. With sleeping, I don't feel the itch. With slumber, I feel everything. I can't go back to bed because I wake up to the itching body, the itching stinging body. I slomber for a couple more hours. Now as I slumber, I itch and sleep, then sweat, itch and sleep. Finally, I give up. Waking up and giving in to the day of the itch. 

I don't fight any more. I've been fighting cancer for going on three years now. Every day, I have had to wake up with the mental exercises of overcoming the fear of cancer. Every day, I have to do other mental exercises trying to overcome the pain of the cancer. Now I no longer have the benefit of waking up to anything. The cancer has invaded my sleep. I get up from slumbering in a sweat, cold with this dominating tingling and itching feeling all over my body and all wanting attention right now. I don't pysche myself up for the day anymore. I don't set goals. I don't think,"I should show Sherri or McKenna how I used to be for an hour today." Now, I just get up. 

I have no interesting thoughts anymore. I just have the itch. Some people want to go back to before they had cancer. I'll settle for an hour or two a couple of years ago when I felt normal. I never feel normal anymore. I want to remind my wife that I didn't just sit around and do nothing. A long time ago, I helped her out. Now she can barely stand to look at me because I am a waste. She has to dicipline the kids, she has to watch over Conner, she has to take care of Maddie. She works, then comes home and does all the housework. She is two parents and wonders when the fuck will I do something to help out around here. She bears a burden now and I am the reason. Why should she look at me with anything but hatred?

I believe in angels

I am not a religious man. Oh, I tried. After I got my stem cell transplant, the big goal every day was to see if I could make it to the cafeteria to get me some food in me and then to a church service which was right across the hall. At MD Anderson, they had a different service from a different Christian religion, so it was cool to see all the different religious philosophies and traditions play out. I particularly like the Lutheran and Unitarian churches. Really wonderful philosophies. That Martin Luther was on to something. The Catholic mass was annoying as usual but maybe that's because I had to go through that every week for twelve years in school. I only walked out on one religion's service. It was by this Asian Christian religion of some kind and they decided that instead of mass (which I had liked previously), they were going to spend the time laughing. I kid you not. It's supposed to be an effective way to cope. Whatever. But hey, I'm there to see if God can do something about my cancer. Not to laugh. 

And without even anyone sort of looking around to see if what this guy said wasn't a joke or something, suddenly there were about thirty or forty somber adults laughing really loudly at nothing. I started laughing only because, well, it was really stupid. Then after getting some rude looks because I was clearly not participating in the right way, I had to leave. It's one of those things that happen to cancer patients. Every once in a while you find yourself in a really wild scene. I think it's because your life is stuck in an extreme situation and you're looking for extreme results. Sometimes it just gets really extreme.

Any way, things didn't work out for God and me. He didn't keep his end of the bargain so I've gone back to having this sort of Hindu/Agnostic belief. Don't worry, I'm not going to lay it on you, although I have thought it out quite nicely and would put it up against any religion. And by the same token, I hope you don't fill my reply section to this blog with too many pleas to come back to God. I appreciate you doing it once or twice but please allow me some respect for my sort of Hindu/Agnostic religion. 

I bring this up because I do, for some unknown and completely irrational reason, believe in angels. I know of three of them. I'm convinced of it. they didn't have wings and for most oftheir lives, they're people. But for an instant, they became angels. I swear. 

In each case, I had stopped fighting. And was many of you know, when you stop fighting, you stop. Each time, I was in a lot of pain and mentally couldn't keep up the things you have to mentally do on a daily basis when you have cancer. I was at a point where I didn't care if I lived or not and a person came to help. One was a nurse who helped me get through the night after my stem cell transplant. Since I have little memory of my time during my transplant, I don't even remember her name. But I know she had a cool Texas accent and way about her. Not the dumb Texas way most know about. The other Texas with a little style.

Another is my wife. It was during my stem cell transplant and I was in so much pain, I was getting a little delerious. I couldn't eat anything. My throat was killing me and even if food got beyond that point, it would come back up the same way pretty quickly as I was feeling very nauseous. My body felt so strange and alien. I couldn't sleep. I was just laying there in this hospital in pain day after day. So one night, my wife went back to the hotel and made me a bunch of peanut butter and jelly sandwiches. Like ten of them. From childhood, I've always loved PB and J. And today in restaurants I'll order it if they got it. Because it's often listed on the kid's menu, I do get strange looks. But at a Chili's or Applebee's or some place where, quite frankly, nothing is good, the PB and J is always a sure thing. I know, making a PB and J sandwich doesn't seem too miraculous or angelic. But it's not the PB and J. It's the act. I needed someone to help me. She was there and she knew exactly what to do, although she was a little heavy on the peanut butter. She knew that for me, eating a good PB and J isn't just a meal, it's an event. Sometimes I even remember my grandma, who was a champion PB and J chef.

I met my third angel just recently. As I hinted to in my earlier post, I decided to go on that clinical trial. Well, the protocol called for drawing a lot of blood out of my body the first day. I would get stuck once every eight hours. And then after that, I would get stuck more times for tests. Now, usually I can handle this. For one thing, the plan called for basically two IVs. One IV for the medicine and the other IV for drawing blood. Drug trials are so regimented that you can't even have the same IV because of the fear of some kind of tainted result. So anywho, two IVs, I can handle that.

But that's not how it went. What I realized was, my veins became so different even from my stem cell transplant days. For any cancer patient, getting chemo makes the walls of the veins tougher. The more chemo you get the tougher the walls are until you really can't even stick a needle into them. I had a lot of chemo. My veins got really, really thick. Also, if you get stuck a lot, your veins get smart. Once they feel that needle coming, they back off into your body. So what happens is you will have a nurse sticking a needle way into your body, poking around muscles and bone, again and again and really hard because even if he or she can find a vein, they still have to get into it. 

As the plan was supposed to go, it wouldn't be that big of a deal because I only needed two IVs. No problem. But they were not only having trouble finding a vein and then getting a needle into it, they also had trouble keeping the needle in the vein. It would just pop out. By about noon, it was clear they weren't going to go with the two IV plan. They had to stick me every hour. 

This day, without a doubt, turned into the most painful day of my life. I'm not a wussy about needles. I used to be. But I got so used to getting stuck that it stopped bothering me. But this day, I went through about twenty sticks and about seven different nurses each trying their technique. Some of them would talk to the vein, some of them would yell at the vein and then at me, almost all of them would poke hard. They tried both arms, both hands and were discussing whether they should go into a leg or somewhere untouched. 

By seven pm, I was done with the blood tests but not done with the other tests. Now, with these tests, they use a bigger needle because they have to shoot nuclear stuff through you. The nuclear stuff gives you the Hersey squirts but hey, a little Hersey squirting was nothing at that point.  

I really didn't know what to do when I met the nurse who had to stick me for this part of the day. He was a guy. I've had him before. He remembered me and asked me how I was doing. Like my angel from Texas, he grew up in the area and had gotten the better parts of the culture, even though he was from a completely different part of the world. New York is a strange place if only because of the residents. There are the rude people and then there are people who are unbelievably nice. Sometimes they're the same person, just in different moods. Of the nice ones, many actually turn out to be really laid back. Like they've seen everything, had gone through the whole stressed out city thing and had come to a place where they were just comfortable with life. He was one of them. He looked at my arm, which was black and blue and didn't say a word. Most nurses would look at my other arm but he didn't. I told him I might want to pass on this today and he said to give him one shot. He said that he sees a vein that is "crying out to be stuck". And in an instant he got me. I barely felt a thing. I was exhausted, completely spent and he got me like it was just a routine part of his day. When I told him what had happened, he said he could tell by looking at my arms but then he went on for about ten minutes showing me all the veins he could stick with one poke.

The thing is, with each of these people, it was no big deal. They all think they're just doing their job. I think that's what makes them angels. They don't know it's a big deal even though it can mean life or death to the people on the receiving end. And then they go on with their lives. Maybe, eventually to the next kind act when and if it happens again like it's a part of life. But the thing is, it's not a part of life. Like I mentioned before, a cancer patient's life is much more extreme. The pain can almost always be tolerable but sometimes it just can't. And then this person comes around and fixes you like it's so simple. 

My Hindu/Agnostic religion differs from most Christian sects in many ways. One of them is the issue of angels. The Bible makes you think that they're these beings with wings who watch over you. I think they come to unknowing people, do their very little and unspectacular thing and then are gone. And unlike my Christian religious colleagues, I have proof.

As for my new treatment, it's working so far. I have no growth to even some small reductions and that was after only one treatment. But I still have a lot of itching, night sweats and nausea related not to the treatment but to having too much cancer in my body. Still, it's a start. 

Michael Jackson, chipmonks and cycles

Damn you oxycodone. Damn you to hell. Why do you have to wear off? I could swim in your warm pill-arms all day and night. But you wear off. How am I ever going to be a drug addict if you wear off?

I saw my doctor today and he literally compared me to Michael Jackson. Not the young, cute black boy. Not the older, nose-less white woman. But the dead drug addict Michael Jackson. He asked me how I was dealing with the itching since there is really no cure other than getting the Hodge to go away. I replied that I have a cocktail: take two oxycodone and three anti-itch medicine pills that don't really work. He started laughing. He said, "Well, of course that will keep you from itching. You're asleep. Ask Michael Jackson if his drugs worked for him and he'd say yes too." But funny thing is, he didn't tell me to go off my cocktail. He didn't say whether it was dangerous or not. You don't tell cancer patients they can't do something. It's not right. Heck, I might rob a bank. Who's going to convict me?

So yes, indeed, I saw my doctor. I decided to go deep. Well, my wife helped. My wife is a nurse so she has good medical sense about her. She's also a very, very sensible woman who is never afraid to tell it exactly like it is. She'd be the only American Idol judge who actually judged. She always tells me my breath stinks or I look like an idiot in that shirt. So I know I'd get straight-forward medical advice from her on this. 

All she said was, "Well, if this doesn't work, we can always try traditional chemo." And she was right. While other treatments had better success rates and this one had, um, none, I'm still willing to try something a little more experimental because I can right now. 

"Why can I?" you ask. "I mean, you were just about to die at Christmas time." Well, the truth is, I can die at any time. But during my month off without any medicine other than an occasional steroid and my trusty oxycodone cocktail, I noticed something strange. My nodes didn't feel like they were growing out of control. Oh, they were growing and I got a big one on my right side. But nothing like I had thought. And that makes senses since the previous treatment left others in a similar slow growth period.

Today the scan proved it (although I still don't believe it and won't until I see the report). But while a few are big, nothing grew more than 1 cm in one month. For those of you who aren't medical professionals, that's pretty good for someone who had no chemo during that time. Basically, they're growing but at the same pace as they were when I was on treatment. 

So I have a screw up due to me and I'm using it. Meaning, if this doesn't work and screws up, I think I still have enough body left in me that doesn't have a cancerous node attached to it that I can overcome it. 

I have to stay in New York for ten days. During which time I will get a transfusion of the medicine and then blood tests every day after that. 

It reminds me of when I worked on animation. I did it twice. One time I flew to LA and the next time I somehow managed to get a trip to Paris even though I had given the agency my two weeks notice. Animation takes a long time for the animators to render. So instead of sitting there looking at their drawings for eight hours, you'd come in in the morning (the animators would have a night shift) and then you'd say something like, "That's great but the black snake needs to form sort of a squiggly, wiggly shape." And the producer would write down, "Needs more squiggly wiggly" and then you'd leave. You'd have the whole day to yourself and then come back at the end of the day and say, "That's fine. But the squiggly wiggly is more like a swerve. and the snake looks more like a chipmonk. We need less chipmonk." And after the producer writes down, "Less chipmonk," and then underlines it, you'd leave to go to dinner and get really drunk and repeat everything in the morning. This would go on for a week or so until the client showed up. At that point, you'd talk about going back to the hotel to do work but would actually go site-seeing and the client would talk about going back to the hotel to do work but would actually go site-seeing.

Well, that's what I have ahead of me here in New York at first. But after the first ten days, it gets sort of complicated and frankly, I'm not even sure I can pull it off. 

After the ten days, I start "cycles". On days one and eight of each three week cycle, I will come back to New York in the morning, take a taxi to the transfusion center, get the medicine for an hour and then take a taxi back to the airport. Do it all in one day. It's just the opposite of squiggly wiggly. Basically once a week on two consecutive weeks, I gotta fly in and fly out. That's the only way I can do it and keep from spending a lot of money on hotel bills. 

If I look at it another way, it's easier to swallow. I already see the doc every three weeks. So this is just adding one trip. I hope it works. Heck, I hope a lot of this works. 

McKenna and some, ah, thing.

It's Friday the 13th. Just thought I'd creep you out a little.

The 10% rule.

To the world of academia, the University of Texas is like the New York Yankees. They have a ton of money and aren't bashful about spending it. The story of why is pretty interesting, especially for those of you who may be looking for a cheap but good out of state school.

About a century ago, the state of Texas was looking for land to put their new state school. They bought up a bunch of acres in West Texas. It was dirt cheap. Nobody wanted to live there because, well, it sucks. But politics came into play and the Texas lawmakers, many of them drunks, decided to instead put their state school in the capital of Austin. Right when they were about to sell the land in West Texas, something wonderful happened. Oil. Someone figured out that all that land was right on top of one really, really large puddle of underground oil. So instead of selling it, the drunk politicians did something very smart--they leased the land. They would get both money from a lease and part of the profit from the oil. 

Even today, when the price of oil goes up and oil companies make all that money, the University of Texas makes money, too. Tons of it. The benefit of being awash in Texas crude is that tuition is very low. While the University of Colorado in Boulder costs upwards of $50,000, you can go to Texas for a fraction of that. Sure your child can't ski in Austin but there are plenty of other pursuits to keep that gradepoint average at just below 3.0. 

The other big benefit is the school can pay ridiculously high prices to get the best talent. Like the Yankees, the UT waits for a professor to develop his or her skills elsewhere. Right when those talents peak with a breakthrough research paper, the UT comes calling and steals the prof. Another thing they do is go the free agent route to find leaders of industry and pay them a ton of money to be visiting or guest professors.

Shelby Carter was a guest professor for my Intro to Marketing class and also the best teacher I've ever had in my life. He was a bigwig for IBM, Xerox and TI and then made millions with his own company. His lectures were mindblowingly insightful and honest. Stuff you'd never get reading those insipid books. 

Professor Carter did those Bucket List Last Lectures before anyone. And he did three of them, the last three lectures in the class. His third to last one was talking about the common wisdom that seems to always come upon us about how America is losing out to other countries. At that time the newly-annointed superpower was Japan. Since then it's been China, India, Brazil, etc. His second lecture was about how all that was a bunch of bull. His point was that even though Japan was killing us in electronics and some other country was leading us at this or that and all the numbers looked bleak, it didn't matter as long as America was innovating. Innovation changed the rules of the game. Once the Japanese passed us in electronics, the computer came around. Once India passed us in computer programming, the Internet comes along. We keep winning because we simply change the game. So as long as we keep innovating and rewarding innovation, we'll keep winning. On a now predictable political tangent here but that's one reason why the "Drill baby, drill" strategy was stupid for the Republicans. It asks us to root for a game we can't win. The party of business was ironically espousing a philosophy that in the long run is bad for business. Instead, we should do what we always do and focus on changing the game. Anyhoo...

His last lecture was easily the most interesting and legendary on the campus. It talks about six or seven observations he's made in the business world and how this knowledge can help us in our jobs. With every job, I think about those observations. Heck, I think about those even more than that. 

One of his observations is the 10% rule. I could be wrong about this but my recollection is as follows. He said in any endeavor--whether it's in business, industry, war, education, sports--10% of the people involved are the true leaders influencing events and changing the world. The rest help but don't really matter much. I'll take advertising as an example. All those commercials you all like? Well, really only about a handful of people in the whole country do them. In advertising, there are only four or five agencies who are doing really fun and creative work. Within those agencies, there are only four or five people that really stand out. For an industry that literally has thousands of people working in it, there are really only a handful of people who are consistently doing the work you like and notice. With some exceptions, most everyone else is doing the stuff you don't like so much. In the show Mad Men, a very accurate recreation of advertising at the start of its greatest era, the only two doing the work and doing it well are Don Draper and Peggy. Everyone else is replaceable. The 10% rule.

This also applies to the world of doctors. I know. We are conditioned to trust our doctors, that they know the big words and all the complex biology. But I have found, as have most everyone else in my predicament, that the 10% rule applies. There are the leaders and then every doc is sort of medical wall paper to me. This comes up because I heard some bad news this week. Carrie Seanor's cousin died from lymphoma this spring. And he didn't have to. Throughout the year, Carrie would talk to me about him and I would get visibly upset as I heard what his docs were offering him as help. Definitely unfair to put Carrie in that situation but she's seen me worse. Anyway, Carrie's answer was always, well, he's at a good hospital and they sound like they are very qualified and have done this before. And that's sort of the myth of docs. Her cousin was getting bad advice. I could see he was getting bad advice because I dealt with docs who knew much more. But this myth about the sanctity of what docs know and do says that there the 10% rule doesn't apply. But it does. It's a fact of the universe. 

We are very programmed to accept mediocrity in the medical profession because we assume all those years in med school give them such unquestionable insight. Deal with a med student for one hour and you realize this is not true. Doctors spend most of their careers learning about care inside the box. They don't learn about care outside the box unless they are one of the best, years later. It's simply too dangerous for their careers to think outside the box. And the problem is, the box is old. Accepted protocol for my disease is almost thirty years old. They've been doing the same thing for thirty years. You think things have changed since then? 

So my soap box tonight is to not be bashful about questioning a doc. If a doc gets all arrogant about you, go to another doc. Also, the ability to talk to a doc to work out problems should be just as important as treatment centers and services. In reality, everyone has about the same in the big cities. But they don't all have inclusive docs. 

In my case, even the 10% docs can let you down. Three weeks ago, it was planned that I would get on a treatment as soon as my wash out period ended. But that's not going to happen because the drug company says so. Even after many emails and phone calls, my team let me fall through the cracks. Now I'm left scrambling for my health in any way possible. The best my team can offer me right now is a promise to think about ways to relieve the cancer in between treatments. 

But I doubt they'll give it much thought. In my world, patients don't come first. It's a fact of life. It was clearly like that at MD Anderson. They didn't even know I relapsed even though I sent multiple emails to them and even sent them the biopsy slides. They had the physical evidence for cripes sake. One day in January the PA, good old Wendy, called and in her humorless way, scolded me for missing my six month appointment. She's my main contact at MDA and didn't even know I relapsed. 

I am a guinea pig first. That's the way it is. If a drug company doesn't want to give me the drug, even though it can save my life, it doesn't do it until it's right for them. This happens all the time. Right now there's a hodge patient named Vaig. He's in a real bad way. He needs a drug called SGN. But no matter what his docs and a lot of other people say, the drug company won't give it to them. The drug is about to be approved by the FDA and they don't want anything, any sudden death or mishap, to get in the way of years and billions in research. Vaig is a casualty. Everybody else moves on.

It's like that with patient care, too. I really have no doctor to call if I get a sniffle. My general practitioner doesn't have the experience to understand a twice relapse, failed stem cell transplant patient. The last time I went into an emergency room, the doctor told me I only had a few months to live and the best he could do is to offer two Advil to stop the swelling. Seriously. 

Oncologists don't really want to deal with you, either. To most, the non 10%, they just don't know what to do. I was flatly turned away at Northwestern. The doc, their lead hodge doctor, told me that he didn't have anything for me (besides a really risky treatment and the same one that killed Carrie's cousin). He couldn't help me. A couple of weeks later, he called and said that maybe the Mayo clinic could help me with something. A couple of weeks later. He casually called. What does he think I was doing in those two weeks? Waiting to die?

Luckily I've planned of a way to stand up and be counted. I'm a guinea pig. Okay fine. But there aren't a lot out there like me. You need me. So if you, the drug company, want to dick me over, fine. If you the doctor aren't willing to fight for me with the drug company, okay. I'll just go to another trial and take another drug. 

I called the Mayo clinic and am awaiting word to see if I can get into their drug trial. In the meantime, I emailed my team in New York and told them, "The first treatment center to put a drug in my mouth or in my veins wins the Michael Herlehy is Human Guinea Pig Sweepstakes". No word on whether they thought it was funny. I'm funny but I'm certainly not in the top 10%.

What are you thinking?

I thought I'd take this time to answer a couple of questions that are usually on people's minds when talking to me.

The first is, "When is this jerk off going to die?" Okay, you probably frame it quite differently. More like, "How long does he have to live? He looks like death already. And doesn't he have another hat?"I'm just going to focus on the first question, which is sort of funny from my point of view because most people certainly wonder about how long I have to live but don't think it's right to ask and of those that do ask, they never get it out very smoothly. 

The answer that some docs will give is I generally have anywhere between 1-3 years from the time of relapse. However, because I relapsed within six months of my stem cell transplant, that changes things a little. One study showed that of these patients, half die before making it the other six months in the year. I didn't die. My year anniversary was June 21 or June 18th. My wife knows. I don't remember much from that time. So I didn't die but I do have an aggressive form of cancer and that means it could turn on me at any time. To sum up, the answer is one day to three years left of life and no I don't have very many hats that fit my head right. 

By the way, that's incorrect information. While I barely got a C in stats class at Texas, I can say with certainty that statistics are only snapshots and, most importantly, outdated ones. A stat is past due by its nature. Three years ago, almost all of the drugs that are now in clinical trials weren't available. So patients got sicker quicker and died with little to help them other than traditional chemo. Now the new drugs are around.

The second question is one everyone asks and don't stutter about. That is, "How am I doing?" Well, not the best. The cancer is clearly spreading and making things uncomfortable. Worse yet, relief is not in sight. I just heard from my team in New York that the drug company won't let me take the treatment until September. The team is still trying but it doesn't look likely. I'm a little peeved at my team too but I'll get into that in my next post.

After getting mad, I decided to get even. Ya see, while I can barely walk a flight of stairs and look like Hume Cronin's Grandfather, I am in high demand. Per the statistics above, there aren't a lot of me alive. Maybe about fifty people. That means there aren't a lot of people to take part in a drug company's study. I'm a hot commodity. So I decided that if the drug company can't make it sooner, they won't get me at all. I called the Mayo Clinic and am now waiting to see if I can get on one of their trials. They haven't called me back. I'll keep you posted.

Needless to say, this new chain of events has made me a little anxious, worried, more uncomfortable, more sick and flighty. That's a long time for this disease to go unchecked. I need to get something in me to at least slow this down. I had to wait before the last trial and my nodes grew. They, in fact, became the nodes that got me kicked off the trial as they continued to grow while the older ones stablized.

Those are my answers. But you can keep asking them if you want. I don't mind.