Good Morning Folks. I went back and forth about whether or not I wanted to make this a proper blog post, but seeing as I have folks who read this blog but do not follow me on social media platforms, I am pushing forward with it. I guess a quick rundown of the last few months is probably in order, in case someone missed the chain of events. On January 21st, I had a routine colonoscopy, and one of the things that came out of it was the diagnosis of a cancerous colorectal tumor. There were a few paths that were outlined, but it all depended upon the specificity of my condition as ot which one we could go down. Effectively, there was what I called the “golden path” that was “surgery-only” and five to eight days in the hospital, and then I moved on with my life. There was also a path that involved four months of Chemotherapy, two months of Radiation, a Surgery, and then two months of being on a bag while things healed, and a follow-up surgery to hook everything back up.
For the last fifty-five days, I have been in limbo, not knowing which path I was headed down, and quite honestly… this is the worst part of the current situation. For as many mental health issues as I have struggled with in my life, I honestly do pretty well at adjusting to reality once it is forced upon me. However, what I do not handle super awesomely is waiting and not knowing. I’ve been through so many things over the last couple of months. Everything was going to hinge upon an MRI that would allow the surgeon to stage the cancer, but when it came time to get said MRI… no one checked the fact that I was bigger than the average bear and as a result was too damned big for their MRI machine. So I had to get scheduled for a totally different machine, which was out of network, and I had to pay a lot of the costs out of pocket. In the meantime, I have had a CT Scan, a PET Scan, Genetic Testing, and many bloodwork draws.
Because of limited scheduling, I have been going down the path of the industrial cancer treatment industry and attending orientation for chemotherapy, and even starting tirzepatide, a GLP-1 agonist, to help reduce my weight and lower the complications of the eventual surgery and radiation. I’ve been terrified of everything that is looming on the horizon, all the while not knowing at all which path I was going to be pushed down. On March 6th, I finally had the MRI, and I figured any day I would get the call from the surgeon outlining what we were going to do. Tomorrow I am scheduled for outpatient surgery to get a chemotherapy port grafted to my body, and I really had to know something before that, so I could either go forward with it or cancel it. Everything that I knew based on my reading and based on the results of various tests made me think that I was a borderline case, that it could go one way or the other and there was nothing that I could do to really predict the results.
Last night at 5:30, I got a call back from the Surgeon. In his eyes, it had progressed past the point where we can comfortably do the “surgery-only” route. So the two options in front of us were his suggested Chemo > Radiation > Surgery > Bag > Surgery route… OR Surgery > Bag > Chemo > Radiation > Surgery. There was no path that did not put me on a bag for some period of time. That is really the thing that terrifies me the most in all of this. If I were going to have to do Chemo and Radiation anyway… I might as well follow the path that was going to have me on the bag for the least amount of time, and also reportedly gives me the best chances for complete remission. So tomorrow at 7:30 in the morning, I will be having a twilight sedation outpatient surgery, and will come out with a fancy new multipurpose port, which they will be using for Chemo and blood draws during this whole ordeal. I’ve had a PICC line before when I was really sick in the hospital, and from what I understand, this is essentially a permanent version of that.
So that is the bad news, and I guess let’s talk about the good news. As I said, I have had a battery of tests, in part because when they did the CT Scan, there was a weird, unexplained nodule on my 7th rib on the left side. The CT and PET Scan combined show that the cancer is very well contained and has not touched any of the lymph nodes or metastasized to any other area of my body. The cancer itself is Stage II and shows high signs of “curative” treatment, because, in orientation, I have learned about all of the catch phrases that indicate your likelihood of survival. Technically, I have T3N0M0 Invasive Moderately Differentiated Adenocarcinoma. These are words that I have googled quite a bit, which I know is probably bad for my mental health, but various comorbidity charts put the 5 year survival rate at 90%. I have no genetic markers for cancer, or at least no known ones, so in theory I have a very good chance of walking out on the other side of this alive and well. It is just going to be a bit of a miserable mess getting there.
Another positive is that the particular treatment path that I will be on does not generally lead to hair loss. This is at least somewhat of a bummer because I was hoping it would come in curly afterwards, like happened with my sister-in-law. I will be on something called FOLFOX, and its major side effect is that, apparently, anything cold will feel like shards of glass and cause severe nerve pain for around the first five days after treatment. It is also going to decimate my immune system, meaning that I will have to be hyper-cautious about any sort of injuries or being around anyone who might be sick. There will also be diarrhea and nausea, but I will be taking some meds to counteract that, hopefully. Essentially, I will be on a two-week rotation, where I will go one day, get 30 mins of chemo in the office, and walk away with a pump that will deliver the rest of the chemotherapy to me over the course of 48 hours. After that, I will go back in and get everything unhooked from my port and begin the resting phase, returning essentially two weeks later to start over. I will be going through eight rounds of this, which will span four months.
I’ve been told that I should take notes during my first cycle because essentially every cycle after that will follow the same pattern. So the good days should land on the same days, and the worst days should follow as well. Five days in is supposed to be my low point, or my “nadir,” when my immune system and blood/platelet production are lowest. After that, everything should be improving until I then return to start it all over again. The orientation was honestly pretty freaking valuable because they prepped us to have a bunch of over-the-counter drugs on hand to deal with the side effects. Additionally, they gave some clear markers of when I should be calling in and getting help and when I can reasonably tough things through. 100.5 is apparently the magic temperature where I need to be taking immediate action in an attempt to stem an infection. I have not run fevers very often, so hopefully this is still a measurement that works for me. It has been wild just how standard this process has been, and how seemingly good they are at treating cancer now.
In other news, the Tirzepatide has been going pretty well. I give the injections to myself on Wednesday mornings, and I am on my 4th week, with next week being my first scheduled increase in dosage. As of this morning, I have lost roughly 28 lbs, and have started some light weight training in the hopes of staving off muscle loss. That is one of the side effects that folks worry about, and that is also one of the side effects of the chemotherapy that I am on, so I am doing some very simple exercises with weights every day. Nothing major, just ten-pound weights, but the repetition seems to be making some minor improvements already. I’ve also drastically overhauled my diet, which I assume is a big part of what has led to such rapid results. I’m only on about half of the final therapeutic dose, and already having significant losses. I’m forcing a lot more fruits and vegetables into my normal routine, and I have come to love a cold apple. I will be super sad that during my treatment, I will not be able to tolerate that due to the nerve pain nonsense.
The loss of my spouse last year already caused some significant shifts in my life, and cancer now… is going to cement even more. I am trying to look to the future and some of the goals that I really want to accomplish once I am on the far side of this situation. For example, I have a friend in the Chicago area that I am going to visit at some point, because that is also a reasonable driving distance for Cyl, one of my two adopted siblings. I also want to make good on the threat to go visit “Erasure” in the Houston area, since my previously planned trip got cancelled due to all of this. I am hoping to be a much smaller person at that point, and that will likely make travel way more enjoyable than it ever has been. I am trying to handle all of this the best that I can, but I also know it is going to be really fucking hard. However, it is eight months of my life… and I can endure anything.
Anyways… now you know as much as I know. I’ve been mostly radio silent about what is going on, because nothing was really certain. I will likely begin chemo before the end of the month, and after that, I will be on a routine path. As things change, I will probably talk about it, but I do not really want my “cancer boy” journey to dominate this blog. This is still a blog about the things I am interested in, mostly, and while cancer is now a part of me… I don’t want to make it the only important thing. If you’ve made it this far, thanks for sticking around.
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Good Morning Folks! I hope you all had a wonderful weekend. This Mixtape is a week late because, quite honestly, last Monday I forgot entirely that I had one sitting waiting in the pocket to be released. However, it seems like destiny might have shone upon me because this morning is going to be a bit of a mess as I have a very early medical appointment, and don’t really have time to bang out a proper blog post. I am hoping to return to weekly releases after this one again, because I enjoy making these and honestly… I end up listening to them as much as any of you might. Now, to preface my explainer as to why I make these… I have always loved the craft of placing songs in a specific order to create a unique mix that matches a specific mood or theme. Oftentimes, these end up with an anchor song and then attempt to make something that flows together with that single song. Others, like today, are more just that I have been in a specific mood and chose songs to go with that mood. I’ve explained this theory a bunch of times by now, but I don’t necessarily take for granted that someone has read every blog post, or honestly ANY of the previous Mixtape Mondays posts.
27 – Fear Loathing Flesh
If you have consumed any of my posts to date, you might have gleaned that I am dealing with a colorectal cancer diagnosis. It’s really hard waking up every morning and seemingly hearing about another person who has died from this disease, and it feels really prevalent. I am sure this is just selection bias… for example, I had never noticed a Nissan Quest on the road until my sister-in-law got one, and then I saw them constantly. Brains are great at pattern recognition when you are looking for something specific. I’ve been ina pretty dark place over the last few weeks because I am effectively in a holding pattern with no forward momentum yet… and what feels like a ticking time bomb inside of me. As a result, I have been listening to much darker music lately, and this is a mix that more or less fits that mood. This mix honestly caused me to find a song that was completely new to me, because none of the US streaming options seemed to have Melt by Front 242, so instead I substituted a really interesting cover by Helalyn Flowers. Probably my favorite thing is when one of these Mixtapes turns someone on to a new song or musician that they had never heard of before, and I feel like maybe this one has more chance of that given that it is crossing a few different musical worlds.
The funny thing about this Mix particularly, is that it has what I would consider to be a “phantom anchor”, because this did start off with Down In It by Nine Inch Nails being a sort of thread that I was pulling upon. However, the more songs that fell in place, the less and less that song really felt like it fit anymore. So I removed it and replaced it with Reptile that seemed to fit much more neatly into the emerging theme. I am pretty sure this is not the first time I have attempted to make a mix with that song, but I never actually ended up creating anything that flowed in the way that I wanted it to. Tomorrow is probably going to be an emotional post, because it has been a while since I have done one of my big dumb dumps of feels posts. So be forewarned. I did not sleep super well last night because Gracie has decided that she needs to scream instead of going to sleep, and I know that I did not get proper sleep until after midnight. After wrapping this up, I am going to start getting ready to leave the house and go off to my early morning appointment. I hope you all have a wonderful week, and one way or another, this is going to be a bit of a week of reckoning for me and my “cancer boy” journey.
As always, however, you can find the full list of Mixtapes over on my Archives, and I love it when people listen to them and comment about them. Hopefully, I will have yet another new mix next Monday.
Mixtape Mondays Archive
The post Mixtape Mondays: Fear Loathing Flesh appeared first on Tales of the Aggronaut.
Yesterday I met with the surgeon who will ultimately remove the cancer from my butt. The office was pretty great because they were really leaning into the fact that they were butt doctors with the decor. Prime example is this delightful lamp with a golden backside. They were running behind and originally I was being “worked in” at 16:30 but did not leave the office until 18:30. My dad was going with me as moral support and he was running early… so we got to the doctors office around 3pm and largely waited around for our turn. I have to admit I was nervous as hell about yesterday, because from the moment I learned about this foreign invader in my rectum… I wanted it out. It turns out things are maybe not that simple, and I am still processing the news that I received.
Ultimately the next step is that today they will be scheduling an MRI which will allow them to stage the cancer. What stage it is in will determine what the path going forward is. When I met with the doctor after my colonoscopy he seemed to indicate that it looked like we caught it early enough and that it would likely be surgery without the need for chemotherapy or radiation. Yesterday I learned that is probably not going to be the case. There is still a golden path however where that might be the case, and that all banks on how the MRI looks. In that golden path it would be straight to surgery and then several weeks of recovery, and a travel restriction of not leaving the state, because I will be under risk of something rupturing for the first few months. That honestly fucking hurt more than anything else because it means that my planned trip down to see “Erasure” is off the table. I was warned by the doctor that this is probably going to be a year long ordeal at a minimum.
If the golden path is off the table, then I will be rushed in to get a port put in my shoulder and will begin chemotherapy and radiation treatment with a new as yet to be named oncologist. The most modern studies apparently show that the best case of complete remission is to hit it with chemotherapy now, rather than later. Then after a course of chemotherapy and radiation, the surgery would take place. The monkey wrench this time however is that instead of a quick in and out surgery, I would be on a temporary bag for two to three months while things heal. Then there would be another surgery to reconnect everything and remove the bag. It was around this point where I started freaking out nice and proper. They would be removing a large chunk of my rectum and colon and then when reconnecting things up, in either scenario there would be some weird circumstances for me long term, but nothing unmanageable. I will just always need access to a friendly bathroom.
If things were not freak out inducing enough… the doctor starts going into all of the possible complications. Since they are working in an area where a lot of other things are. I could wind up incontinent if they nick anything to do with the kidneys, or could end up various flavors of erectile dysfunction depending on what they damaged. There is also the possibility of a rupture which means that we would be on a clock to catch that fast enough before I went septic and potentially died. Then there is the whole doomsday scenario of if they did not catch this in time, and it spreads to the lungs or liver… at which point it is probably game over for me as a human being. I get that the first doctor that did my colonoscopy was probably just trying to keep me calm and from freaking out on him… but I was really not fully prepared for the results of yesterday.
More than that I was not really prepared to have a speculum up my ass. For the ladies out there, they did in fact insert it ice fucking cold… so that is unfortunately not just a gynecology thing. Yesterday was a lot. Today is also going to be a lot because I was already scheduled for a cardiology appointment where they do an ultrasound. It is also at this point that the dark thoughts that I have struggled with my entire life start to creep in. Am I really worth saving? Should I just give up and accept my fate and try and eek out as much joy as I can in the meantime? Really out of everything that has happened the thing that I worry about the most is the damage it will end up doing to the fledgling relationship that I am trying to build with “Erasure”. We were friends before, and we will always be at least that… but I wanted more.
Basically I am very scared and not really sure how to deal with those emotions because I am not always great at that. Everything would be so much easier were I not alone. I have people that I can lean on, but I hate asking them for anything… and I also hate tolerating other human beings in my space. Its a catch 22… I need people but I also have to psyche myself up… to be able to accept them. I am lucky in that I have plenty of folks who are willing to help, I just have to start availing myself of them. For the moment I am focusing entirely on getting through the MRI which will hopefully be either at the tail end of this week or beginning of the next week. Nothing can be known until that is done, and from there I figure out how to cope with whatever path we end up going down.
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Good Morning Folks! Hopefully yall are surviving Snowmageddon 2026. For the most part I have stayed in out of the mess. I had plenty of food, and so long as power stayed on I was going to be good. We got somewhere in the neighborhood of eight to ten inches. The snow was so dry that drifts were pretty rampant so it was really hard to tell an actual estimate, but I know when I was clearing my jeep yesterday and making a path so I could get out today for an appointment, it was coming up to mid calf high at times. I cleared the front porch enough that I could start putting food out for the outdoor kitties as well. I’ve not seen Tripod, but in the past when we have had cold snaps like this she has an underground borough system that she crawls down into. For years we had bunnies in our backyard prior to Tripod taking up residence there, and I think she has been using their underground warrens.
Things have mostly been okay… save for the fact that it has been raining in my livingroom. This is a problem that I had hoped we solved about three months ago when the roofers came out to work on the flashing at the top of the roof. My guess is that the snow sitting up there has basically been on top of wherever the leak starts, and then heat rising up through the roof is melting it. Essentially as far as we have been able to guess it runs down under the shingles and then finds a way into the house in the middle of the livingroom, dripping out onto this cross beam, and then down onto the ceiling fan before ultimately hitting the floor. Sadly the leak does not come down in a single spot, so essentially I just have to put towels out. It had stopped mid day yesterday, but then started up again late last night as things started to re-freeze and was still going whenever I went to bed. It stopped at some point over night because it is not going this morning. I’ve called the roofers to be on the list for after this is all over, but for now there is not a whole hell of a lot I can do. I have some IKEA bathmats and some towels down to soak up the water…. which I will run a load in the washer once things have chilled a bit.
My folks I think got it worse north of me. This is their front yard and you can barely make out the wheelchair access ramp. My dad of course had already trudged a path out to his shop, because he spends most of his time there. I think more than anything he was checking on the cats, who stay overnight in there with a heater on. I never knew my Dad was as big of a softie for strays as he is, until later in life. Maybe I get my own attachment to street cats by genes. I got out yesterday and cleared the cars and a path out, and then was wondering why the hell everything hurt today. These are all activities that I do not normally have to do, so I guess it makes sense that everything feels like it aches in my chest and arms. I don’t even have a proper snow shovel, because this happens so infrequently. My old shovel was rusted through so I tossed it, and had not gotten around to getting a new one. I guess I will make that a bigger priority. Essentially I cleared what I cleared with one of those giant plastic yard rakes and a nylon bristled broom.
This weekend I spent a lot of time snuggled with cats and watching movies downstairs on the television. I will probably make a post tomorrow about some of the things that I watched. “The Librarian” reminded me that I have a Letterboxd account so if you do that thing feel free to follow and I will likely give you a follow back. I like keeping track of media consumption and previously my plex server log was the most reliable method up until this point. However that was flawed because when I was pulling together my movies of the year post… I completely somehow missed the existence of Sinners. I figure I will try and keep up with this similar to how I do Storygraph and Bookwyrm. Speaking of those two I really need to get back in the swing of reading, or at least listening to an audiobook while I do other things. I figure on the 29th with the launch of the Phrecia league it might be a good time to get back engaged.
Speaking of gaming… I played a heck of a lot of Destiny Rising this weekend. I was trying to keep all three accounts active, because we were having some bad luck finding strongholds. Yesterday morning we cleared the three that we had access to, but did not find the third until we were already logged in trying to clear the other two. Thanks to Jade Rabbit I have been playing Umeko a lot more on my alt accounts, and apparently doing well enough to regularly get MVP when I run some strikes. Essentially I am trying to get account two high enough so that I can get 3 charges of Iron Commander and can get my 60 Pinnacle done without running any strikes. Account three… at some point I just need to put my head down and push through the campaign because I have not even unlocked the second planet.
Last night I played a bit of Path of Exile II, especially since Kodra has been talking about it quite a bit. I know come the 29th I will be over in Path of Exile and playing the new Legacy of Phrecia event, but in the meantime I am hopping around and making things explode in POE2. For Phrecia I am all over the place on what to play. Right now I am looking at either doing something akin to my Ice Trap of Hollowness build, a Blind Prophet bow traps, or Poison Minions. Pohx is going for a life stacking Righteous Fire build, but it is going to require a lot of gear to make it work. I had fun with RF Scavenger last time but I also needed a mageblood to make it work, and I am not sure if I want to push that hard. It sort of annoys me that there has not been a lot of fresh theorycrafting for builds within the POE community. Everyone seems to be focused on currency strats… which will fucking sort themselves out pending you have a good build.
Anyways! I hope you have fared well during the winter onslaught. I hope my livingroom rain comes to a close finally, and I hope todays tests go well and they don’t find anything else wrong with me. I am deeply scared about everything that is going on right now with cancer diagnosis and still not having much information. I will hopefully make it through this however.
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