Tuesday, September 2nd, 2014 Day 1 Hamilton
The day finds me at thirty-seven thousand feet, pushing six hundred and ten miles per hour, and not on the plane I was supposed to be on this morning. I lagged a little too long getting out of the house, and missed check-in for my original flight, the direct one that would have taken me straight to Toronto, Taranta, The T-dot (apparently), and instead landed myself on an aeroplane that landed me first in Calgary, where I loitered for a while. The pilots for my connecting flight had flown in from Regina, and I can only assume were bewildered and amazed at the glory of so large a metropolitan centre. Majestic, majestic, sprawling, poorly organized, majestic Calgary.
I'm on a plane. Right. Good. Onward.
We're just passing over Jamestown and about to swoop over Fargo, North Dakota (that's some good police work, there, Margie), and there are still a few hours to go. This sky tube is packed so full of people meat that it is very nearly a sky sausage, but hey, at least it's Westjet and not Air Canada. I dislike Air Canada, for entirely legitimate reasons; this is a thing that I am given to understand is perfectly normal.
From Toronto, I'll take a shuttle bus to Hamilton, which will, handily, drop me exactly at my intended destination - the Lakeview Lodge, an almost-but-not-quite attached dorm/hotel/thingy for cancer patients to stay at while pursuing pokes, prods, zaps, pills, infusions, and general fancity-shmancity medicinatory endeavours at the Juravinski Centre, adjunct as it is to McMaster University. Which, I'm told, is a very good place to go for higher learning. Probably also drinking, but that tends to be less conducive to the learning part of that previous descriptor. I'll stay at the Lodge until Friday at three-thirty pm, at which point I will migrate to the Days Inn, because for some odd reason, the housing for cancer patients coming for treatment from outside of Hamilton is closed on the weekends. I know. I don't think they do, though.
The Lakeview Lodge is quite close to the Juravinski Centre (connected, actually), though, and even if I elected to stay elsewhere for the duration, it would be where I would come to be collected for the aforementioned zaps, which are of a variety of zaps too rare and grand to be procured in Saskatoon, hence the required travel. Well, to be fully fair, or perhaps in fair fullness, you can receive these kinds of zaps, the electron-beam radiative sort of zaps, at home, but you can't get them applied to your whole body at once. We currently lack that capacity. And so, I am taking this cylinder through the air, held up by the lift generated by the Bernoulli effect caused by the rush of the atmosphere over the airfoil shape of the wings, that rush in turn generated by the controlled detonation of quite combustible, nay, explosive complex hydrocarbon compounds that we retrieve from the ground through various (generally kind of environmentally nasty) methods. Planes are neat. I am in a thing that exploits a quirk of gaseous behaviour and directed explosions to get me so safely and demurely to my destination that most people don't stop to consider for even a split-second how amazing it is that we can do this.
In the past couple of weeks, I've had the conversation about what I'm doing in Hamilton, why I'm doing it, and how long it's going to take at least fifty times. So, to save myself a certain amount of further explanatory discourse, I'll elaborate here:
1) I am getting total body electron-beam radiation treatments for the still currently active non-Hodgkin's Lymphoma in my epidermis. Yes, that is what I got two stem cell transplants for; no, it's not entirely fair to say that the stem cell transplants didn't work - Dad's donor cells have fully rooted, and I have achieved 100% chimerism. It's just that at this time, the transplants have failed to resolve my lymphoma in its entirety, and said lymphoma is behaving in such a way that we really shouldn't leave it alone. The transplants could yet be effective: the graft-versus-lymphoma-effect can take up to two years to accomplish its business. That being said, they might not, and it is at least fair to plan as if they won't, if not being the smartest thing that I could possibly be doing.
2) In previous postings, I mentioned a six-to-nine week potential stay. That is no longer the case, and instead, I shall be there for 18 days, including flights. As it turns out, the treatment process has been recently refined, a trend that is spreading throughout all of radiation-as-cancer-treatment. It used to be that radiotherapy erred greatly on the side of caution, but as long term follow up studies have matured, we as a society have begun to be able to administer what is much, much closer to the absolute minimum effective dose. In full fact, I will be getting less radiation in this total body process than was administered to the sole and heel of my left foot in 2010, with a similar (positive) therapeutic outcome expected.
3) No, this probably won't cure me forever. Full disclosure demands that I tell you that will probably never happen. It also demands that I express that I will still probably live a fairly normal life-span, almost certainly as long or longer than someone who fails to exercise and maintain dietary discretion. It's just that my life span is going to be punctuated by bouts of medical complications and periodic, but largely temporary, removals of freedoms due to said complications.
I expect this to go well, the treatment is such that I don't even require a caregiver for my stay, and I'll be home before anyone except Ash has a chance to miss me. I hermit so much these days that it's not like it'll really be all that big of a difference.
What's big, grey, and can't climb a tree?
A castle.
I'm on a plane. Right. Good. Onward.
We're just passing over Jamestown and about to swoop over Fargo, North Dakota (that's some good police work, there, Margie), and there are still a few hours to go. This sky tube is packed so full of people meat that it is very nearly a sky sausage, but hey, at least it's Westjet and not Air Canada. I dislike Air Canada, for entirely legitimate reasons; this is a thing that I am given to understand is perfectly normal.
From Toronto, I'll take a shuttle bus to Hamilton, which will, handily, drop me exactly at my intended destination - the Lakeview Lodge, an almost-but-not-quite attached dorm/hotel/thingy for cancer patients to stay at while pursuing pokes, prods, zaps, pills, infusions, and general fancity-shmancity medicinatory endeavours at the Juravinski Centre, adjunct as it is to McMaster University. Which, I'm told, is a very good place to go for higher learning. Probably also drinking, but that tends to be less conducive to the learning part of that previous descriptor. I'll stay at the Lodge until Friday at three-thirty pm, at which point I will migrate to the Days Inn, because for some odd reason, the housing for cancer patients coming for treatment from outside of Hamilton is closed on the weekends. I know. I don't think they do, though.
The Lakeview Lodge is quite close to the Juravinski Centre (connected, actually), though, and even if I elected to stay elsewhere for the duration, it would be where I would come to be collected for the aforementioned zaps, which are of a variety of zaps too rare and grand to be procured in Saskatoon, hence the required travel. Well, to be fully fair, or perhaps in fair fullness, you can receive these kinds of zaps, the electron-beam radiative sort of zaps, at home, but you can't get them applied to your whole body at once. We currently lack that capacity. And so, I am taking this cylinder through the air, held up by the lift generated by the Bernoulli effect caused by the rush of the atmosphere over the airfoil shape of the wings, that rush in turn generated by the controlled detonation of quite combustible, nay, explosive complex hydrocarbon compounds that we retrieve from the ground through various (generally kind of environmentally nasty) methods. Planes are neat. I am in a thing that exploits a quirk of gaseous behaviour and directed explosions to get me so safely and demurely to my destination that most people don't stop to consider for even a split-second how amazing it is that we can do this.
In the past couple of weeks, I've had the conversation about what I'm doing in Hamilton, why I'm doing it, and how long it's going to take at least fifty times. So, to save myself a certain amount of further explanatory discourse, I'll elaborate here:
1) I am getting total body electron-beam radiation treatments for the still currently active non-Hodgkin's Lymphoma in my epidermis. Yes, that is what I got two stem cell transplants for; no, it's not entirely fair to say that the stem cell transplants didn't work - Dad's donor cells have fully rooted, and I have achieved 100% chimerism. It's just that at this time, the transplants have failed to resolve my lymphoma in its entirety, and said lymphoma is behaving in such a way that we really shouldn't leave it alone. The transplants could yet be effective: the graft-versus-lymphoma-effect can take up to two years to accomplish its business. That being said, they might not, and it is at least fair to plan as if they won't, if not being the smartest thing that I could possibly be doing.
2) In previous postings, I mentioned a six-to-nine week potential stay. That is no longer the case, and instead, I shall be there for 18 days, including flights. As it turns out, the treatment process has been recently refined, a trend that is spreading throughout all of radiation-as-cancer-treatment. It used to be that radiotherapy erred greatly on the side of caution, but as long term follow up studies have matured, we as a society have begun to be able to administer what is much, much closer to the absolute minimum effective dose. In full fact, I will be getting less radiation in this total body process than was administered to the sole and heel of my left foot in 2010, with a similar (positive) therapeutic outcome expected.
3) No, this probably won't cure me forever. Full disclosure demands that I tell you that will probably never happen. It also demands that I express that I will still probably live a fairly normal life-span, almost certainly as long or longer than someone who fails to exercise and maintain dietary discretion. It's just that my life span is going to be punctuated by bouts of medical complications and periodic, but largely temporary, removals of freedoms due to said complications.
I expect this to go well, the treatment is such that I don't even require a caregiver for my stay, and I'll be home before anyone except Ash has a chance to miss me. I hermit so much these days that it's not like it'll really be all that big of a difference.
What's big, grey, and can't climb a tree?
A castle.
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