Testing My Bear

I think my bear on a tricycle needs his diaper changed. I am finally getting fatigued from the radiation and that is getting me prone to frustration. On top of that, I've been trying to play a little more on my hip (don't tell Kathy) and now my hip hurts a little bit and I am back to limping a little. It has done that before and it will heal, but it will take a few days. My varsity team lost a tough, close match on Wednesday, and that got me really annoyed because I take losses personally. That night I lay awake like a Negative Nancy and thought to myself "I hate cancer and having a hurt hip and not being able to jump and having to go to the doctor every day and getting nekked every day and being tired and losing a stupid match and why can't we defend an out-of-system attack and did I mention I hate cancer and I hate waiting to see if it comes back and why won't my stupid patch of chest hair fall out where they are radiating it?"

But, Jason, remember the taco and the bear with the diaper and the tricycle. Yeah, I forgot. I coach some of the coolest kids in the world, my team is in the top 15 in the area, they are playing hard, we have a chance at going to state, I am pretty much cured of cancer, I just have to lie there during radiation and there is no more poking me with needles, clothing is a burden anyway and I don't have to worry about wearing something cool for treatment, I get a stylish sun tan where the radiation is shooting me, I got 10 tattoos for free, I still have two legs and I don't have to be in a wheelchair and I still get to watch Ultimate Fighting on Thursdays and I don't feel like throwing up. I also have only 1 more week of treatment, Friday is my last day (they changed it from 17 days to 15 days of treatment).

So, that will be it: Friday, October 6, will be my last treatment. That will be the day I officially give the start of my remission and I am planning on it being the last day of any treatment until maybe some colonoscopies and/or prostate cancer when I am 65 or 70 or maybe some Alzheimer's. So until then it is sunshine and babies and beautiful dirt mound mountains and the occasional PET scan.

Bear on a Tricycle: The Primordial Image

After posting my blog yesterday, I decided to look real quick on the internet to see if there were any pictures out there of what was in my head. The first image I found was absolutely perfect. I am reading Jung now and he says that humans inherit "primordial images" and that they show up in myths and stories. He says the images cross cultural boundaries because they are deep in the collective unconcious. Well, I found multiple pictures of bears riding tricycles, including some real bears riding scooters. Maybe my bear on a tricycle is a primordial image. I have never seen a bear on a tricycle that I know of, so I am pretty sure I inherited it from my parents. My image did not include a diaper, but that is clearly an hillarious upgrade.

Bear on a Tricycle: Negative Nancy and the Taco

Here is my second installment of the Bear On a Tricycle series. I wrote the introduction a while ago. It has been bugging me to continue my thought, but then again, I've been lazy. I am excusing myself though, because I have/had cancer. This one is about how I used to be somewhat of a pessimist.

Yeah, I would say I was a pessimist. I had a knack for picking out the bad - well, I still have the knack. If you showed me anything, I could probably give you an all-inclusive list of what was wrong with it. When I graduated high school, it was not an accomplishment, it was an ending. When I graduated college, I dreaded working. If I had a goal, I could point out all the obstacles. If you showed me a beautiful mountain, I would tell you it was a big pile of dirt (not that I now find landscapes all that intriguing). If I played a sport, I could tell you everything I messed up. When I am coaching, I call any player with this attitude a "Negative Nancy" and I tell them I will punch them in the face if they don't stop it. This attitude is very common, far more common than the "I can actually do this" attitude. Negative Nancies are common because being negative is, in large part, learned. It is also easy, because our brains can easily see the problems.

Negativity can incapacitate you. It breeds fear, anger and anxiety and plenty of other bad stuff. I think that it is a hindrance to success unless you want to be an artist, but then again, you would probably have to pull a Van Gogh. You can still survive as a Negative Nancy, but you cannot do it with style. I could have made it through cancer like a big whiny baby, but that would have been a waste and it would have been really annoying (not that I wasn't a big baby at times). It just helps to keep your blood flowing and your mind working instead of shutting down and crying about it all the time (not that I didn't cry). It was good that I had been transformed mentally by the time I got cancer.

It is just a perspective change. Most people think they are victims of their perspective. They think that when they are mad, they are just mad and nothing can change it. But you really can change your perspective. Here is an example. One day I was walking to the transit (BART) after leaving work in downtown San Francisco (back when I was a software engineer) and I went by Taco Bell and I ordered a couple of tacos with no lettuce. Of course, they put lettuce on them. I really wanted the tacos, and I really wanted to enjoy them, but to me lettuce was terrible. I did not have the ability to scrape off the lettuce because I was carrying stuff and I had to get to my train and I did not want to lose any of the delicious lymphoma-causing pseudo-cheese precariously situated on top of the lettuce. My options were to either throw away the tacos or to eat them. I did not want to eat them if I did not like them. I decided I would eat the tacos and ENJOY the tacos SPECIFICALLY for the lettuce within. I decided to look forward to the crunchiness of the lettuce, instead of dreading its texture's infiltration into my preconception of a proper taco's consistency. I succeeded and liked the tacos, of course, otherwise this story would have been even dumber. I told this story to one of my SHP players recently and she thought I was smoking crack. My point about the taco is that your perspectives - and even your taste buds - are subordinate to conscious choice.

So next up on Bear on a Tricycle, I'll tell you how I think I changed my Negative Nancy mindset through repeated conscious choices.

Radiation and Aliens

I started radiation on Monday. When I walked in to the radiation room for my first time I was greeted by about 6 technicians, most of them were women. They all introduced themselves to me, then they said I could go ahead and take off everything but my shoes - even my hat. The concept of stripping down in front of a crowd of people in order to be shot with radiation was not appealing to me, so I tried to imagine myself somewhere else that was less scary, like being on an alien ship as an abductee.

Inside the alien ship there were two rooms: the computer room and the probing room. The computer room had an array of complicated computer systems. I was put in the probing room, of course. In the probing room there was a table next to this huge mechanical contraption with about 6 robotic arms. The aliens played music for me to relax me while they did whatever it was that they do, on Monday they played Nat King Cole. I had to lie down on my back with my arms above my head and I could not move. I could only see the faint outlines of the technicians out of my peripheral vision while they were moving me and lining up my alien markings. Their hands and tentacles were cold. About 20 minutes into it my arms fell asleep and I could not feel them. I imagined that the aliens had plucked them off to experiment on them. After the aliens left the room they could still see me from their computer room because there is a camera constantly monitoring me. Who knows how many aliens were in there.

On the intercom a sweet sounding female alien said, "Ok, Jason, everything looks good, we are now going to start treatment." "Unforgettable" was the song that was playing as the buzzer sounded indicating that radiation was being administered to my spine. The next phase of alien probing was the radiation to my chest. They moved my table with a remote control. Then this other piece of the robot came down onto my chest and the aliens used a permanent marker to draw around the target zone. Again the aliens scurried away to the computer room to watch me and laugh at me as they shot my chest with electrons. Then they came back in, lined up my hip with cold hands. Coincidentally, "Unforgettable" came on again and then went the buzzing.

It was a total of an hour-and-a-half. When I left they had apparently reattached my arms; I saw them but I could not feel them. I was delighted to discover that my arms started working by the time I got to my truck. I was still able to drive and I felt no residual pain except for a little funkiness in my arms from the lack of blood for an hour. I had two shapes drawn on me: one on the center of my chest surrounding my weird patch of chest hair, and one on the front of my hip. Both markings smeared over the course of the day. That was the first of 17 treatments finished. I have since gone in every day at 8:30am. It is not fun for me yet.

Tattoos

This morning I went in to get my body mapped out with the CT scan. They used permanent blue dots on me to help them line me up. I have 8 new tattoos in total: 1 on each hip, 1 in front of my right hip, 3 down the center of my chest, and 1 under each armpit. I had to change out of my clothes, but this time they gave me no gown, just a sheet. Now I regret all that trash I talked about the 3 arm-hole miniskirt I get for the PET scans.

Next Monday I will start regular treatments. It will be every weekday for 17 visits. They say my blood counts will dip again because they are radiating my hip and sternum (where the blood cells are made).

I am getting tired of doctor visits, especially ones that don't allow clothing. I feel great though! I still have nowhere near the energy I had before cancer, but now I realize how drained that chemo made me.

Now I'm a Real Hotpocket

I have decided to get radiation. I will now just have a small chance of getting another cancer as a result of the radiation, but it is minimal. They will be shoving me into their glorified microwave 17 times over 3 weeks. I will get blue dot tattoos to mark the fields. We will radiate my hip, my T-8 vertebral body and my sternum. They will use some electron method for radiating the sternum, which means that radiation will go only a short distance and not pass all the way through my body.

Monday is my CT scan that they will use to map out my body to see where they will shoot me. Then a few days later I will begin the daily trips to get my treatments. I will get a total of 3000 rads to my tumor sites, which is the standard dose that tends to kill rougue mutant lymphoma cells.

I'll probably bring in a poptart and put it on my hip so when they radiate me I will also heat up my breakfast.