Featuring: Ace, Ashgar, Belghast, Tamrielo, and Thalen
Hey Folks! We were out last week due to various scheduling issues, but led off the show with a bit of a message about Bel going through Chemo and maybe having scheduling issues every other week. From there, we talk a bit about the Artemis II mission and how wild it is to experience “Moon Joy”, as we enter a new phase of space exploration. Ash talks a bit about the Rabbit and Steel update, and Tam talks about the wild experience of playing Screamer. From there, we talk quite a bit about the Promise Mascot Agency and what a weird gem of a game it is, and how the developer is maybe one to watch going forward. We talk a bit about Last Epoch and the progress each of us makes, and how Tam was able to lean entirely into his player fantasy… and at the same time, complete more of the game than I think any of us have, as he dropped Uber Aberroth. Tam also discusses how sometimes it is just best to nuke your emulator devices and start from scratch, and then we wrap things up with a bit of discussion about upcoming changes to Dune Awakening and how they “get it” and are changing the game to reflect the PVE nature of its player base.
Good Morning Folks. Yesterday was my first round of Chemotherapy and I took it at this massive cancer treatment center. While the floor was relatively empty, I took a quick photo of the cubicle across from me and specifically timed it when no one else was in the line of sight for privacy reasons. This floor was massive, and I did my math correctly; there are around 120 of these cubicals, and by the time I left around noonish, pretty much every slot was filled. These were serviced by around 30 nurses with a handful of roamers on each side. It is consistently amazing to me just how much cancer is happening in order to support a center like this. The crew continues to be amazing, and there was even a floater roaming around constantly seeing if we needed anything. She made a run through the cubicles with a box full of snacks asking if anyone wanted anything.
The chair shown was way more comfortable than I expected it to be. It reclined a bit and had both built-in heat and built-in massage functionality. At 6’4″, my legs stuck out too far to be able to support the footrest fully extended, so I mostly just sat there in the default configuration. I got to the parking lot of the cancer center around 6:30 am, and they opened up around 6:45. I had to make a trip to the Lab to get my port hooked up, and before that, a quick visit by the finance office to sign some waivers before starting. I was seated on the infusion floor by around 8:30, but the actual process did not take place for a bit. They were waiting on my lab work to get back, and given how many people were actively on the floor at that point, it makes sense why it might have taken a bit of time. Initially was given a bolus of a steroid and a long lasting anti-nauseau med that should, in theory, last for three days before I need to figure out if I have to take any of the prescription meds for the same purpose. After this ran through my system, I had to wait around 30 minutes for everything to cycle before I started the next phase.
I am taking a treatment package known collectively as “Folfox” where the first round is a dose of Oxaliplatin, which takes about 2.5 hours to cycle through. The Oxaliplatin actually goes a bit quicker, but there is a bag of a vitamin mixture that is given at the same time, which took a bit longer to finish up after the first bag was completed. However, they were able to crank up the delivery rate once it was the only bag running. The worst part about all of this is the fact that I had to go to the bathroom simply due to the fact that they had pumped me full of so much fluid. I thought MAYBE I could wait it out, but essentially I had to unhook the pump and wheel it into the restroom and then do my business in as careful of a manner as possible. The pumps themselves were battery-powered, so they would continue to work while unplugged, at least for a short period of time.
The next step was to hook me up to my portable party ball of poison, which would then deliver the fluorouracil (5-FU) over the next 48 hours. Because I got a later start to everything due to labs, I will go back about an hour later on Thursday to unhook things. They carefully fished the line for the take-home chemo edition through the bottom of my shirt so that I could change clothing more easily when I got home. This is not my particular pump, but showing a drained one that I found on the internet, and I then mosaiced out the information on it. Essentially, the elastic bladder around the center of the pump deflates as the medication drips into you, and overnight, mine shows a significant loss in total bulk. You have to maintain a certain elevation of the pump so that things continue to drain successfully. The biggest problem that I have personally had is trying to sleep while this is attached to me, because I am terrified that I will kink a cord, fail to maintain the height difference, or one of the cats will puncture it while they attempt to love on me. This is exacerbated by the fact that they give you some rather lengthy hazmat instructions on what to do if it gets damaged.
When I got home, I played this fun new game of… is it a chemo side effect or am I just exhausted? Due to nerves, I woke up around 3 am yesterday morning and could not get to sleep. So by the time five rolled around, I was pretty freaking dead to the world. I think I went to sleep around 7:30 or at least attempted it, but given the awkward nature of the whole situation, I am not entirely certain how much sleep I actually got. I kept having to get up to pee thanks to the constant trickle of fluids into me throughout the night from the party ball. The other problem that I dealt with was the fact that the Oxaliplatin was no joke. There is a famous side effect where there is a nerve pain reaction to cold, which causes neuropathy, and the more often it triggers, the more likely you are to have it permanently. I had turned up the temperature of the house, but I had to do this again to around 75 when I got home, because picking up a metal water bottle immediately triggered this effect. So what constitutes “cold” is a really broad range of temperatures. I need to get a jug of water that I can have sitting out at room temperature that I can then fill my water bottles from, because I cannot drink tap water at the default cool temperature.
I am awake, but I am honestly not sure how much longer I will be. As I said before, I did not sleep hardly at all last night, and I am not sure how much work I will actually be able to get done today. I normally sleep on my belly when I am getting good restful REM sleep, and I cannot do that while hooked to this pump. I am ultimately going to have to get used to this nonsense because I have seven more rounds of this, and there is no way in hell I am going to survive it if I have to keep going sleepless for 48 hours. A lot of my pre-game jitters were due to the fact that I did not really know what to expect. This whole ordeal is going to rapidly become rote, and that should help considerably with the whole not getting much sleep the night before thing. The hardest part at the moment is my inability to shower, but I plan on taking sponge baths today and tomorrow. I will probably wear a beanie/tuque in tomorrow when I go to get everything unhooked because my hair is already rather jacked up due to sleep and the lack of a shower.
You might ask yourself… Bel, why are you sharing so much information about this process? Well, I figure it serves two purposes. The first is to document this for my own purposes, and the second is to demystify the process for anyone who might be coming along after me with colorectal cancer. There is also this negative side effect of viewing people dealing with cancer as being slightly less than the normal human beings that they are. I write through pretty much everything that I deal with, including the hard things like cancer and the death of my spouse. Seeing me writing about it, I hope makes you realize that I am still the same person I always was, that I just have a new piece of bullshit to deal with. I am really hoping that 2027 is a more chill year because the death of a spouse in 2025 and cancer in 2026 is pretty fucking awful. Right now, more than anything… I just want some damned rest.
The positive is that, for the moment, there is nothing that I can really peg on chemotherapy specifically. I just have a general sense that I was run over by a truck, and feel generically awful. There was a big part of me that expected to feel like I was dying inside once the proper poison started seeping into me. If my math is correct, my low point is going to be Friday, and then after that, it will be an upward trend of recovering pretty much everything. I am hoping by Monday, I will be mostly back to normal or at least well on my way. For this exact moment, there is nothing that I am really experiencing that I cannot account for as general exhaustion and the fact that nature is having sex… and trying to destroy me with allergies. I figure that will change, and I will probably talk about it as it does. I am hoping to be able to at least take a nap today… but I might just take the second half of the day off and try to rest. This whole process sucks… but so far slightly less than I was expecting it to.
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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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