The Old Ben!

That’s how I feel today, like the old Ben. Now, I don’t mean the Ben from two years ago,; I feel like the Ben from twenty years in the future!

Remember back when I had pain in the joints and I asked one of the Doctors of the Day if there were something I could take for the joint pain and he kicked me off the PC altogether? That’s how I feel now.

Three years, ten months, three weeks, and three days ago I was crossing a parking lot and I had a spotting truck run into me, knocking me unconscious and putting me in Emergency. My left hip joint was affected at that time. I had a big ol’ bruise on my left thigh. I had various aches and pains for several weeks.

It’s that same joint that is causing me fits right now. At the same time, other joints in my body are aching as well. It’s called a flare. When one hurts, they all hurt. Before, I found that I was low on magnesium. Supplementing my magnesium helped immensely with the joint pain. Right now, I’m not so sure. It’s not working very well.

When this is done, I'm going to soak in a hot bath!

~~~~~~~~~

There are thing in my life that I would like to improve. I hope that you have similar goals. Many things I’m pretty good at, depending who you ask, but there is one thing in particular that I would like to improve.

I got some paperwork recently from one of my doctors. Included in with all the documents was a hand-written note. You have to understand; I’ve talked to this woman several times on the phone, three times or so in person, and have seen her husband twice.

But she touched my heart with her note. It was simple:

Dear Ben;

I hope this note finds you doing well. You are such
a strong person. I think about you a lot. God Bless You and look
after you.

You are in my thoughts!

This woman is going through similar issues to those I face. When I’ve seen her, she’s always been in good shape, while she’s has gotten to see me in a variety of conditions. When we’ve talked, I’ve always tried to pass on the things that I’ve found that helped me.

Now, knowing what I know, with one simple note, she brightened my day immensely.

Some day, I would hope to be able to touch people the same way that she has touched me, and made me feel much better.

Kunolunkwa, y te quiero!

Let's Just Pass...

...on the blog tonight. I did have one thing go right today, and I'm amazed at the effort it took to get it done. You aren't going to believe what you have to do when dealing with insurance companies. Then again, maybe you will.

I've done more today than I've done in months, so I must be getting better. But now I'm tired, slightly fatigued, and slightly out of breath. I'm not really out of breath, but that's doctorspeak for what happens to me when I do overexert a bit.

So, I'm going to sit back, watch a couple of episodes of Jericho and talk to Ben when he gets home. Besides, I made two posts yesterday.

Kunolunkwa, y te quiero.

Let Me Say This About That

If you haven’t read the other post for today, this might not make too much sense. If you have, as you can tell, I haven’t let it go yet.

Back in the early ‘70’s, a guy by the name of Robert J. Ringer wrote a book called Winning Through Intimidation. Now, it isn’t really about intimidating people, but rather how not to be intimidated.

But I read his book a long time ago. My paperback is pretty ratty-looking today. What impressed me the most, what I “took away” from the book was his Three Type Theory as illustrated by a card game. To quote from the book:

What this theory states is that there are only three types of people who exist
in the business world (again, with the one exception being a person who stands
to directly benefit as a result of your earning, and receiving, income), as
follows:

Type Number One:

This type lets you know from
the outset—either through his words or actions, or both—that he’s out to get all
of your chips. He then follows through by attempting to do just
that.

Type Number Two:

This type assures you that he’s
not interested in getting your chips, and he usually infers that he wants to see
you get everything “that’s coming to you.” He then follows through, just
like Type Number One, and attempts to grab all of your chips
anyway.

Type Number Three:

This type also assures you
that he’s not interested in getting any of your chips, but, unlike Type Number
Two, he sincerely means it. That, however, is where the difference ends;
due to any one of a number of reasons—ranging from his own bungling to his
personal standards for rationalizing what’s right and wrong—he, like Types
Number One and Two, still ends up trying to grab your chips.

Later in the book, I wasn’t able to find his quote, Ringer does say that there is a Type Number Four who says that he isn’t after your chips, and really means it, but the number of people like that are so small that they are statistically insignificant.

Having read this so many years ago, I am still amazed how often I forget this advice. But, it forms the basis for the fact that I am loath to accept any charity because it has the nasty habit of turning on you. As Heinlein pointed out, “There Ain’t No Such Thing As A Free Lunch!” (TANSTAAFL)

Months ago I was assured that an act of largesse on the part of someone was quite valid and that I wouldn’t have to worry—I even commented on it in a post here—only to have that act rescinded today, and now I’m back to having to worry.

I’d like to believe that it was a case of Type Number Three in action. I’d hate to think that it was a case of Type Number Two. But it is still small consolation. And I do take it personally.

But I guess I should be thankful. This frees me from any gratitude that I may have held toward this person and the people they represent.

You Wanna Talk Stress?

OK, my stress level has jumped considerably. Between the hospital, work, and insurance companies (plural), they have really put the screws to me this week. I thought I was supposed to keep my stress level down? And silly me, I thought that they’d help.

I’d really like to be able to talk about what’s going on, but I’m going to have to keep things quiet for now. The kids are aware of what is going on. But I may need to get some professionals involved.

But think about it. The hospital knows that I’m a cancer patient. They should know that in order for me to get better, they would have to keep their dealings with me at a low stress level. NOT!

Amy took a job in Florida working with a BayCare hospital in Tampa. I’m assuming that it is “Tampa Bay Care.” She says they’re not the same company. And that they call their “patients” “customers!” Looks like I need to move.

I had to call another insurance company that pays my auto premium while I’m “disabled.” They sent me a letter in late February, telling me that I have ignored the forms they sent to me and that they were going to discontinue paying my premium. I called back and said that they never sent any forms to me, because I never received them. They said they’d send them right out, again!

You guessed it; I still haven’t received any forms. I called today to complain, again. They said “we’ll send out more forms, blah, blah, blah.” I told them to fax the forms to my Doctor. While they checked to see if they had his fax number, I jumped on the Internet, and had his number very quickly. So I gave them the number.

Then I called the doctor’s office to let them know what was going on. It was just a few minutes after 5:00PM and all I got a recorded message. I hung on to get an operator and asked for the office voice mail. She said I’d have to call back after 7:15AM. I explained the situation and said that I just wished to leave a message. “Call back in the morning.” Customer service?

How much do you want to bet that I’ll still have to leave a frickin’ voicemail in the morning? How much? Anybody out there with a little sporting blood in their veins? Or are you too used to being treated like a nuisance instead of a customer?

~~~~~~~~~

But enough about that, my stress level is getting too high, again.

I started my beard again. My hair, what little there is on the top of my head, OK on the side of my head, has been growing out. I actually had to trim a little around the ears today.

Since the stubble on my face seemed to be growing thicker, I figured that I’d give it a try and try to get back to my personal self-image.

~~~~~~~~~

Have I mentioned lately how much I love my kids and appreciate them? You’re letting me slide here folks.

I got a call from my daughter today to catch up on a few issues. When my kids were little, I never “gave” them the answers. I made them think about things for themselves. Sometimes I actually gave them bogus answers on many occasions, just to make them discount what they heard and think about the answer they were looking for.

My son took things in stride and simply looked for the proper answer. But my daughter…. She liked to confront me with my stupid answers while looking for the answer.

I mentioned today that the stressful situation on Monday, nearly “blapping” after four decades of avoiding that situation, made me realize that I was, after all was said and done, still a human. And that I had had such higher aspirations than that.

Boy did she let me have it. I haven’t laughed so hard in quite a while. She was laughing just as much. She certainly helped relieve some of my stress today.

~~~~~~~~~

After all that, I may be doing better physically. I hate to get my hopes too high right now. But, I missed a dose of pain meds today and didn’t really notice until it was almost time for my next dose. That’s always good.

Kunolunkwa, y te quireo!

"As a juror, I will exercise my 1000-year-old duty to arrive at a verdict, not just on the basis of the facts of a particular case, or instructions I am given, but through my power to reason, my knowledge of the Bill of Rights, and my individual conscience. When needful, I will judge the law itself." -L. Neil Smith

Not Much To Tell

I’ve had a low-grade fever today and have been feeling poorly. My feet are acting up again and even my stomach is feeling a bit sore.

I walked over to The Men’s Mall to get some screws to fix my end table that suffered the “casualties of the Holidays.” I still need to put the door back on.

I fixed more Tuna Helper, today. I had to toss two cans of tuna that I had in the cupboard. They were under pressure and even I know that’s not good. I’ll toss the rest later. And I still need to do the dishes.

~~~~~~~~~

I mentioned RateMyCop.com yesterday and how it appeared that they were already “off the air.” Well, they were. Their hosting company, GoDaddy, pulled their plug without even telling them apparently. RateMyCop then paid for another hosting company only to have them pull the plug as well.

See what happens when you want to hold the “po po” accountable for their actions?

BTW, that is the focus of the article at Nuremberg II. People have to be held accountable for their actions. They can’t get away with just saying, “My government made me do it.”

Kunolunkwa, y te quiero.

Rate A Cop!

As a kind of follow up to my Thoughts on the Police post from February 17, I decided to post this information.

It seems there’s a website that’s getting a lot of flack from quite a few police departments and organizations. This article explains what’s going on. It seems someone has come up with a web site that allows you, the masters of this country to rate the service you get from your servants, the police. It seems that the police doesn’t want that to happen,

The site is RateMyCop.com. Now, it may just be a coincidence that when I went out to view the site, it was “currently unavailable.”

The reporter said that, “The First Amendment would be the site’s protection.” Well we already know how that’s going to turn out, now don’t we?

Meanwhile, back in Utah, the incident that had politicians calling for hiding any documentation of police misconduct from the public garnered the man that was tasered by the police officer $40K despite the fact that the cop was cleared of any wrongdoing.

~~~~~~~~~

You may have noticed that the archive section over there on the left has changed. I got a question, which I interpreted as a request, to make life easier to access the older posts. A new reader wanted to start at the beginning post and read all six months worth of belly-aching in order. But it was hard under the former system to do that. This system will allow for starting and stopping a little easier.

As a former QA guy, I try to take care of my customers! :-) But I don’t know if I’ll write the book that she wants….

I am wondering though, is there any reason why I should allow the search engines to crawl all over my blog? As we approach 2,000 views, not counting mine anymore, I get a lot of hits for things like curamin, hydrocodone, hunting stories, and all sorts of things. Just wondering.

~~~~~~~~~

Are the new hours of daylight bothering anybody else? For some reason, it really seems to throw me off. Then again, I don’t have a schedule to keep while the rest of you do. Sorry!

~~~~~~~~~

I slept in today until almost noon, got up, got dressed and went out to check the mail. While I was out, I drained the big puddle that was forming on the sidewalk, and removed some ice from the drive so the water could drain. Had I more energy, I would have removed all the ice, but I ended up in the back of the vehicle several times trying to catch my breath.

And my back needed some support. After I came in, I slept for an hour or two just to catch up. I really do like valerian root!

I apologize if I have given the wrong impression about what ails me. Sunni gave some great suggestions to help calm an upset tummy, but that isn’t really the issue.

There have been comments about my ability to watch the depictions of autopsies on TV while I eat my meals. I even continued to eat tonight while Himmy was “blapping” his cookies on one of the chairs in my office. He got down, wandered around for a while and is now in the other chair in the office! Who said cats are stupid?

That type of thing doesn’t bother me.

Remember back when I got started on the chemo and I commented on the “hiccups and palpitations?” What I’m experiencing now is just an extension of that, I believe. The Blob, my own personal tumor, is just at the top of the stomach. The cancer is in the lower esophageal wall, which also contains the muscles that control the lower esophageal sphincter. That is the area that was getting hit by the radiation up until two weeks ago tomorrow.

Like an open wound, the area can be very sensitive. Most of the time it does just fine, but there are times when if I don’t treat it right, it wants to let me know in no uncertain terms that I did something wrong. That’s what happened ‘that day that shall live in infamy;’ can it have just been yesterday?

Apparently, my timing with my pain meds and the ingestion of my meds in pill form wasn’t right. The pills irritated the Gastro-Esophageal Juncture and it tried to rid itself of the offending substances. It will be a long time before I forget that spasm of my stomach.

So, I take my pain meds first. A bit later I take my pill meds. I try to drink something, something warm preferably, for a while before taking any pills. Then I eat something soft. I hate to say it but the Tuna Helper seemed to work just fine and it actually tasted pretty good.

While I’m just a snorkeler, my son is into SCUBA diving. We usually run down to Florida and hit the water for some fun. I’ll paddle around on the surface while my son plays 40 feet below me! It was during one of these dives that I got to see my first baracuda —“Ba-ba , ra-ra, cu-cu, da-da!” You may have to be as old as I am to remember that little radio ditty—so thanks to him, I got to watch my first baracuda as it circled us from about 30 feet way.

Anyway, my daughter got her brother some dive magazine subscriptions for Christmas this past year. We read them at the kitchen table. There was recently an article about “mal de mer” otherwise known as seasickness. It was an interesting article although I have never experienced it. But it’s the kind of thing that someone going on any cruise needs to know, diving or otherwise.

Sunni recommended a sugared soft drink and ginger, as in ginger ale. Both were mentioned in the article. It’s kind of funny because I’m a big fan of non-alcoholic ginger beer. I think I got my son started on it as well. He likes the Jamaican style, while I like the more mellow style, like Stewarts’s Ginger Beer.

My problem is that ginger augments the effects of the rat poison I take. As a result of Monday’s tests, I have to reduce the amount of Warfarin that I’m taking for the next couple of weeks because my INR is too high, again. I was surprised at how much blood was on the gauze after they removed the needle from my port.

However, I have been drinking A&W Root Beer ever since I found out that candida albicans needed an alkaline environment to survive. And I was having a problem with thrush for a while early in my chemotherapy.

So, again, I apologize if my choice of words, or the way I represent my problems might cause some misunderstanding. I blame it on my chemobrain.

I was engaged in a “discussion” in another venue when my partner disagreed with my choice of words. He had a different connotation than the one I was using for the word I used.

To try and make my big point and not get hung up on hair-splitting connotations, I conceded the word choice and tried to continue to make my larger point. He then proceeded to make a big deal out of my “error” in words and started to make fun of my error. And this is from a guy who knows about my “condition.” Imagine what someone who doesn't know would do to me!

So, I guess I’ll have to restrict my discussions to my blog where everyone knows that my brain is fried right now, but I’m hoping that it will start functioning again after all the toxic chemo and radiation effects have been chelated from my body.

But, again, I apologize if I sometimes might not make sense, or don’t use the right word, or give a false impression.

Four pages! For someone who can’t communicate his thoughts well, someone who can’t pick the right words, I guess I try to make up for it in volume. ;-)

Kunolunkwa, y te quireo!

What A Day—Now I’m Pregnant?

It started out just like any other day. But it’s a day I will long remember.

Today was supposed to be my lab work and consult with the doctor of the day starting about 10:00AM. I got up and took my meds. It’s amazing how just taking medication can cause someone to not feel well. My mouth was tasting of metal again, like it is right now.

I stopped to get some cash so I could stop and get some biscuits and gravy from Wendy’s so I could tell if the other day was just a fluke. Since I wasn’t feeling well, I decided to pass on consuming the B&G and they ended up in my fridge.

I had my port accessed, to keep it cleaned out, for my blood tests, told my tale of woe to the nurse, and waited for the doctor. He came in and I explained my problems to him as well. “It’s your stomach,” was about all he said.

My back pain is from the radiation treatment. My stomach is responding to even more mistreatment than the back received. Even my abdominal muscles are sore, I found out, and that is supposed to be from the stomach somehow as well.

Anyway, I will have a PET Scan done of Friday, March 21, 2008 with a follow-up lab tests and consult on Monday, March 24, 2008 to give me the results of the tests and to tell me what they want to do.

I stopped to get some groceries, some Tuna Helper and the like. It’s good that I didn’t remember the BLT and egg sandwich I lusted after on the movie Spanglish. I probably wouldn’t be able to eat it. I can’t tell you the amount of food that I’ve purchased only to throw away because I wasn’t able to stomach it. “Stomach it,” get it?

I got home wanting to get a bunch of stuff done only to be weakened by the morning’s efforts so I ended up taking a nap, which is again unusual for me at this point. I am amazed how my stomach can affect my brain. I get confused so easily when I have the stomach pain.

Now you’re probably wondering what the reference of pregnancy in the title has to do with anything. In my post Long, Long Ago… I mentioned that vomiting, or “blapping” as Sunni called it, is against my religion, which is why I never want to become pregnant.

As mentioned in that post, I twice had started looking for something to “blap” into, but never really got that far. Today, this morning after taking my meds, I got that far. There wasn’t anything in the stomach to “blap” except for the meds and the little bit of water I needed to take them. And my jaw muscles are pretty strong, all the talking I do, so nothing actually came up. But the stomach contracted and tried very hard to get rid of whatever triggered it. Had I had very much in my stomach at all, it could have come out very easily.

So, now I’m wondering if I’m going to experience “morning sickness” every morning or what. As I said before, I am extremely grateful that I haven’t had any, make that ANY, nausea or vomiting, until now. But it looks like that honeymoon is over.

So, I didn’t get anything that I wanted to get done today at all. I’m hoping tht tomorrow will be different. I’ll try to jolly my stomach along before taking my meds to see if I can offset the sensitivity of my stomach.

Kunolunkwa, y te quiero.

Nuremberg II

Happy Birthday, Oscar

Along about 4:30AM I got up to visit the little boy’s room. I found Mousebane outside my door and he was very glad to see me. Being in a middle-of-the-night stupor, I continued into the bathroom and looked around. Sometime earlier, the sound of a “bump” had made its way into my consciousness despite sleep and my white noise generator (WNG). It had sounded like something had tipped over in the bathroom, but I found nothing improper in there.

When I left the bathroom Mousebane was right up against the door, still very happy to see me again although he ran off down the hall. Being the good morning-zombie that I am, I followed. I discovered the door to the kitchen closed.

When Ben uses the oven the smoke alarm outside the bedrooms can go off for no apparent reason. Rather than pull the battery, we just close the door.

Well it seems that Mouse got stuck on the wrong side of the door. His water is in the kitchen and basement; his food and cat box are in the basement, out the other door in the kitchen.

He took off down the stairs without even saying, “Thanks!”

~~~~~~~~~

I see we changed back to regular time. I was checking to see when my email to my former neighbor finally got sent only to find that it left my outbox one hour into my future. So I had to stop and find out how that had happened. Since my cell phone along with my computer said I was living one hour in the past, I guessed that the government had changed time again. At least now when I go out to capture some midday sun, it truly will be midday!

See, even the government can be right once a year.

~~~~~~~~~

After careful consideration, I realized that since I hardly throw anything away, I must have fixed the brush for my vacuum cleaner at some point in the past. So downstairs I went and found two, count ‘em two, used brushes. It seems that long hair plays havoc on the brushes! Not mine, BTW!! LOL!!!!

So, I pulled the bad bearing from the most recent brush and substituted one from one of the old brushes after being rebuilt by yours truly. Put it in the vacuum and lo and behold, it worked! So, sometime tomorrow I hope to get the house vacuumed.

~~~~~~~~~

Of course that all depends on my VLCC visit tomorrow at 10:00AM. I’m only supposed to have blood work and a consult with Dr. “Himmy” but we all know how that has turned out before.

I’m hoping to find out what we are going to be doing in the near future.

~~~~~~~~~

So have you figured out what I mean when I link to Nuremberg II yet?

Kunolunkwa, y te quiero!