It’s been a really complicated year–some major highs and lows. We’ve spent the last couple days on unfinished business: seeing Laura Poitras’ gripping CITIZEN FOUR (highly recommended), doing our donations for the year, and it looks like I am actually going to get an article revised that I thought I might not be able to …
Category Archives: Cancer
I got what I wanted, sort of
So after having three (yes 3) of my doctoral students defend their dissertations Monday and Tuesday, my reward was to spend yesterday and today getting tests and doctoring. The good news is that they have decided to go back to watchful waiting for now. I will have another full body scan in three months (this time …
Thanksgiving update
It’s American thanksgiving! I’m thankful for my wonderful family and friends (some of whom I will see tonight at a potluck), KITTENS and CARRIE, great colleagues and students, as well as for the kindness of strangers. Since I last posted, I got a little information on Inspire.com but the ThyCa people managed to manually add …
Well, that didn’t work out as hoped
So the radioactive iodine didn’t work. Of course “didn’t work” is a bit of an abstract concept. You will recall that the possible outcomes ranged from complete annihilation of the metastatic thyroid cancer cells in my lungs to, well, nothing. It definitely didn’t get rid of the cells. If it slowed or stopped the growth, …
Tuesday Dinner / Today Lunch Report
Tastebuds are mostly back! Tuesday night I arrived home tired, and didn’t feel like cooking. t took out some left over tabbouleh from the weekend. I ate it and thought “wow, this tastes good.” When I realized that 3-day old tabbouleh doesn’t usually taste better than newer tabbouleh, I went over to the butter dish, rubbed …
I Haz No Flavor
Or more accurately, I am losing my taste. I probably do have a flavour. This particular side effect of RAI can set in a few days after treatment, and in this case it did. I noticed it this morning at breakfast. It’s sort of like having a badly burned tongue–everything is muted, some flavours more …
A typology of shitness
All things considered, radioactive iodine treatment is “getting off easy.” It lacks the existential fatigue and sunburn from within that sets in with external beam radiation. It lacks the utterly disjunctive transformation and bizarro pain from unexpected places that comes with surgery, and it lacks the body-falling-apart poison experience of chemo (I’ve only heard about …