Whoa there tiger??!!!

Hey there friends, thanks for stopping by to listen again. It's Saturday morning and I just finished a bowl of Peanut Butter Puffins cereal which always delights me, if you haven't had this you must, it will change you. (Ahhhhh the simple things....) As has been in the last weeks of wretchedness this past week was nothing shy of what I have come to expect, though without the constipation. WOOOOOOOFUCKINHAAAAAA! I got my Oncologist who has a keen demeanor and resemblance to Bill Murray to write me a prescription for Marinol which is THC in pill form. This was a saving grace when staring into the eyes of three days of creaking, piercing joint aches and an unexplainably maddening state of mind where there is so much indecision, built up anxiety and fatigue simultaneously in my body that the only thing I can think of to do is throw the damn couch through the front window. It feels like the worst hangover you've ever had in your life coupled with feelings of having eighty cups of coffee along with enough indecision and lack of enthusiasm to make a mentally ill person feel ill. The Marinol at least gives me a little distraction from the harshness and offers up any sort of different feeling other than what the chemo gives me. On a side note.....We went to see the Fabulous Mr. Fox the other night and it was absolutely entertaining, adventurous and so ambitiously creative I left the theatre utterly glowing even in the thick of feeling terrible. Go check it out, it's really fun! I started to crawl out of the hole Thursday as I usually do, fumbling to get my natural human feelings back and get enough energy to make it further than the couch to fridge journey which is usually the extent of my venturings for the most part of the week. Matter a fact yesterday I went to the Mountain with my mom and rode my snow sliding board for a couple hours, nine runs to be exact. This being the utmost apex of my human existence in the last four months I had smiles from ear to ear the entire time, shoulda put sunblock on my teeth...... The old legs definitely weren't ready for the whole balance strength and control routine for sure, I felt at times like I was eight years old again on one of my first days on the hill. My arms flailing to regain balance as to avoid catching an edge and my legs jarring unknowingly trying to comprehend just what the their assignment exactly was for the day. On the third run skidding down the mountain I lost control a little bit blasting mach 10 on my heel edge beaming straight toward my mom who had cut across and halted to see how I was progressing down the slightly bumping an maybe a bit too icy slope. Her regards as to what my facial expression looked like as I narrowly missed her and regained some sort of control were that of sheer panic and anticipation of impending doom as she laughed and asked if I was ok. As I neared the bottom of the hill on the same run I had again reached about mach 10 this time feeling in control though as I laid down a huge toe side carve with some hand drag which usually comes very comfortable and confidant to me but apparently not so much for my back leg as it decided it was not powerful enough to support that much carvetude and buckled, sending me into a pitching heelside edge catch to ass side impact followed by back snapping neck whiplash as my head bounced off the hard pack and my beanie and goggles went their own ways flying through the air. Sprawled out like road kill I laid there slightly hurt and a bit panicked, I felt nostalgic and somewhat comical as I don't think I had caught a heel edge like that since those now strikingly familiar first days of trying to learn how to ride one of these crazy snowsliders. I picked haggard myself up and proceeded to enjoy the rest of day on the hill with a slight neck crink and some incling to maybe take it a little easier there cancer boy. So here I am today at home plunking the keys once again with a sore ass neck and a whole lot of stoke in the air. I'm having fun here and there and the days that aren't completely fucking terrifyingly miserable are positively zen. Hope you all are having great days and have great holidays as well. Thanks for listening. Stick.

My nurse says to me,"People don't die from cancer they die from chemotherapy."

Wooooooooweeeeee!!!!!! Hot damn I been through some strange shit this past week. As I have spoke of before the constipation issues are harsh and they are still definitely plagueing me with plug. My last dose went as planned though I needed two doses of Nuepogen which is a chemical that stimulates white blood cell growth. My white blood cell count was 100 after my last treatment compared to that of any normal count which is around 4500. With counts this low my chances of catching a cold are like the chances of hitting traffic on the 5 on Friday afternoon. This has me made one of those weirdo OCD people who carries hand sanitizer around in their pocket and doesn't shake peoples hands. Yesterday I was having lunch in public and using a napkin to hold the ketchup bottle and I caught these people looking at me all strange half rolling their eyes. Got some gnarly joint aches this time around which were basically putting me on the bench, coupled with gastronomical stomach pain and flooring fatigue I was basically a sack of bones for the last week or so. I didn't sleep for three nights straight cause my stomach was bloated to the point of having a front butt, found myself walking around the neighborhoods at four in the morning to try to find some catharsis for my cringing carcass. It's kind of weirdly cool having no sleep schedule and nothing to be on time for, I find myself in really odd circumstances. With all the shatner that came along with this last dose and all that didn't.......hehehe.... I'm finally back producing some results in the lavatory after taking crack fiend doses of mirlax, milk of magnesia, senna, prune juice and coffee all simultaneously trying to get the party started. Been back on the high energy tip the past two days and on my bike again, even went and skated asswell which always gives me some groundation. So here I am sitting in this way too fucking familiar living room in my sedimentary position on the sofa plunking away on the keys again as the snow flurries are bustling in the sky out the front window and the furnace fights the ongoing fight against the twenty degree temps outside. I miss you guys so much, I miss..... I miss.....I miss....This thing is a third of the way through at this point and I will win and I will figure out how to control these side effects. I will be on the road again and be visiting all I so dearly cherish so very soon. I'm happy, I'm sad, I'm scared and I'm fucking winning this fight. Love You all, thanks for listening. Stick

the truths of the matter......

It's wednesday now a week after my second dose of (life), as I'm now calling it in my quest to be positive about this fiasco. It's hard to see the positive attributes to these gnarly meds sometimes when I'm cramping and constipated or I have nill motivation to do much else than stare at the idiot box all day. But...I have also been put in check a couple times by some dear ol' friends that the reality of the matter is that I'm saving my own life by letting the nurses pump me full of this wretched concoction of drug. I have yet to lose my yellow mop from my head which is encouraging though I'm pretty confident one of the days it's going to shed in one foul swoop. I'm able to make a couple of ill researched assumptions about how I'm going to feel during these courses of medication. The day of treatment (thursday) and the day after I'm usually pretty cracked out and almost hyper from the steroids they give me and then come friday night i'm like a kid on ridelin all cross eyed and staring off at the wall. The weekend serves me up real nice with some exhaustion and kind of just like brain sedation, nothing really to say and waves of complete indecision. This kind of seems like it will burden me for about the first week as it did the first round. So like I said it's wednesday now and I'm starting to feel a little more focused and defined with some energy building. Hopefully things will unfold like last week and by the weekend I'll be joyously moving my carcass about. Everything in my body seems to ache and malfunction in perfect synchronicity making me feel like i'm turning into an old man or developing some gnarly arthritis all of the sudden,although I have a feeling I'm lacking real doses of vitamin D from being house bound for so many days on end. It's frightening sometimes wondering if everything will go back to normal and I'll feel like normal ol' stick once again, at times it seems unimaginable I'll tell you what. Rode my bike downtown yesterday and passed a blind lady staggering her way down the sidewalk meticulously navigating herself to her destination with all the intent and motivation in the world. "Damn!" I thought. I could have lost my eyes in some freak accident, I could have come down with some crazy bone disease and be forced into an amputation, or have been paralized or........I pedaled along with growing acceptance and gratitude for my own situation. The realizations I have almost daily about life really give me such a new take on where I'm headed and what the reason be on this sometimes unjust, unpredictable and beutifully cruel adventure of living. Call someone and tell them you love them. There is no reason why you or them couldn't just be gone tomorrow. Thanks for checking in. Stick.

On the high horse......Yeehaaaa

Well hot damn, It's two days before my next treatment and I have been feeling stellar. Yep that's the right word to use, stellar. I have waded through the hagardness and am feeling almost like a regular ol' dude. Been pedaling my limbs around town for the past couple days checking out this wacky city I grew up in. My perspective on this place has definitely changed in the past month or so, I can see the great things about this valley and have been able to form a new found understanding as to why my mom has been here for thirty years and never left as well as why my friends can never seem to make it out and stay out. Rode my skatin board yesterday with a longtime friend which seriously felt like everything I ever needed in life, rolling my bones around and laughing at janky ass skateboardisms brought a ray of light into my life that feels like has been blocked for awhile. I told my mom it felt like soul food, like it brought me back to my own self consciousness and understanding, assuring all that I love about what my life is and who is in it.(UHHHHHH....Maybe gettin too deep eh?) Anyway, things are good for me now, my girlfriend is here and living in Mom's house with me, talk about a trip, living back under my mom's roof with my girlfriend jobless and crusty. This whole blogness is a whole lot easier and productive when I got shit to gripe about, but there's plenty of that to come here in the next week I'm sure. Maybe not so gnar though, I got this bottle of milk of magnesia that I plan on swigging on like a truckee river vagrant on a bottle of cheap bourbon. That should keep my bowels moving and eliminate the stabbing battle in my gut hopefully. With that relieved I'm hoping to just be real real tired and weak which is manageable I imagine. Got two more days of smooth cruisin here, thanks for checkin in! Hope you're all well, thank you for the comments they really make my day and I look forward to hearing from you! Bye.

Good god please!!!!!!!!!!!!

All I want to do is please please take a real, sizable human-like brown long nice shit!!!! It's Tuesday afternoon here at the Nevada rehabilitation center on sunrise dr. and shit has definitely gone down hill since Friday. (Literally) On Saturday which was Halloween I was feeling pretty creepy for sure, I don't think I had dropped deuce since Thursday after treatment and I was starting to feel more clogged than a sorority house shower drain. Having wicked gnarly cramping and absolute defeating fatigue I watched as my mom prepped the house with decorations and spooky decor. I tried my best to be a real sport but I really felt like trash. I slept while my mom carved pumpkins, she woke me up with a special surprise though. I was getting a massage in a half an hour so I had to muster out of my crust and on down to the clinic. Obviously the massage felt great and I think I probably needed it but I'm not sure it was the best idea in hindsight. By the time all the kids were done ravaging our candy stash and things were mellowing out around the house I was getting stabbing stomach pains and it felt hard to the touch like I had a six pack on my bladder, not rad at all. My amazing mom made a midnight dash to the store to get me some stuff to get me squirting. I took four bowel movers and tried to sleep the night away, interrupted by stab jabbing cramps and panic stricken jolts to the bathroom with no happy endings. When I woke in the morning I must have sounded like an eighty year old fat man trying to tie his shoes. I was so crippled in pain in my stomach I marched back and forth down the hallway from bathroom to bed praying something would happen, even a gigantic fart would have been very well received. I tossed and moaned in bed for the first four hours of Sunday thinking that "if I died today it wouldn't be so bad, I've had a good run." Finally I was granted some results which allowed me to at least make it to the living room and try to start may day as a real life person. Mom was anxious to get out of the house as the weather was incredibly perfect and she has this sixth sense about what's happening up at Lake Tahoe. So she made me get in the car and go for a ride to the lake which was really the last thing on the face of the planet that I felt like doing but as she thought and I wanted to agree, it might do me some good. NO GOOD! Pretzeled in the front seat dealing with cramping constiarreah was anything but helpful, I tried my best to appreciate the heaven like day up there at the lake but everything was hell to me on sunday. We got to the beach and I tried to walk but I had nothing, honestly I did not have the energy to even walk the seventy degree alpine lake shore. I just flopped on the ground and layed in the sand feeling more helpless and defeated than I have honestly ever felt in my life. (I'm sure this will become a common claim as my postings continue) This type of fatigue is really fucking scary, I thought that I might be dieing for real, I had to concentrate to move my limbs where I wanted them to go. Ahhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh......Sunday was literally shit storm of crampy, bubbling intestinal irratance with a real nice dose of flooring fatigue.

Yesterday and today have been a real improvement I must say. I went for a bike ride yesterday if that says anything to the tune of the day. When the nurses pumped me full of the death one of the drugs in the concoction called DTIC was supposed to have been split with saline to dilute the dose as it was pumped into my veins. My cooky ass nurse didn't add the saline bag to my IV pole and just started pumping me full of straight DTIC which felt like there was fire being pumped into my arm along with the fiercest charlie horse you could imagine all at once. In panic I wondered if I was having an odd reaction or if this was the wrong stuff or.........that shit was sooooooo damn painful! After I called for my nurse and she was aware of what had happened and being scolded by another nurse she hooked me up with my saline bag. The messed up thing is that now six days later I'm having these tweaked numbing pains through my forearm veins where I had initially felt the agony. My arm is sore to the touch in that area and there is some oddly foreign, powerless feelings going on from fore arm to shoulder. I think the bitch zorched the inside of my arm with the toxic death by not paying full attention to the task at hand. That's the scariest part about this whole thing is that these ladies are in control of making sure the doses, drugs, and administration are all correct every time, if not some serious shit could go down, after all they're dealing with toxic acids. Enough griping for today, that's how things have been. Thanks for checking in. I hope your having a wonderful day!

Onto the battlefield young man!

Well it's day two after the dose of death and I've been having a little nausea last night and this morning. Ahhhhhh the sleeping let me tell you. I was only able to sleep six hours the night after the treatment. I woke up at 7am wired as hell and just had to get up. I had all this crazy energy in the morning that I actually handled some tax, disability, insurance phone calls and forms. Very unlike me on my best of days, especially before noon. Went out and about yesterday riding around in my van feeling like I was on such a different level than the rest of the world. Floating through my day with absolutely no intent, direction, purpose or expectation was something that I've not felt in a really really long time. Got home and passed the hell out instantly around 4 o clock or something. The craziest thing I've felt up to this point is the instantaneous depth of sleep I dive into within seconds of laying my head down. I cannot recount one single thought after laying down yesterday for my nap or going to bed the last to nights. It's like as if my head gets level with my heart it just shuts off like a light. I guess it's a lot like a drunken pass out. The nausea feelings are a bit unnerving when they come about, I seriously think this thing will be so heavy on my brain and spirit if I cannot control the nausea. So far the medications are doing there job pretty well but it's some freaky feeling shit when your body starts tweaking and you don't know whether to sit up, lay down, drink water, walk around, run into the wall, scream, or just curl into fetal and cry.
I'm lurking at the house now until it's time to drive my funky ass over to the cancer clinic for a blood test today so they can check my kidney function levels as well as my acidity levels. I have to take these pills that help my bladder break down the highly toxic and acidic bypass as my body rapidly breaks down the cancerous cells. According to my oncologist nearly two thirds of the cancerous buildup in my nodal system as well as my grapefruit sized tumor in my chest will blow up like asteroids and flush through my system in the next three weeks. It's important my bladder and kidney functions are performing top notch in order to pass all this cancerous shrapnel and not cause kidney stones, bladder infections and other rotten things. It's a trip to me that it will take another five months of chemo flushing as well as radiation to get rid of the microscopic 1/3rd of the cancer cells that remain burdening my system. Pesky fuckers. That's me today. Suns out and the weather is warmer. Maybe go to Costco with mom, bed bath and beyond if there's time......

And so the war begins....

Well Mr. Batcheller.... my nurse says" You most certainly will be losing all of the hair on your head and most likely some eyebrow and eyelashes along with the bulk of your pubic hair. There is some chance that you will lose all sperm count and become sterile after your dosages of these drugs. Having kids in the future may not be an option. Your libido is likely also to shrink making you not interested in recreation with your partner, you may also develop mouth and throat ulcers which will make any sexual undertaking or intimate kissing with your partner a high risk for infection. Dark oddly shaped areas of skin are known to show up unexpectedly, your finger and toe nails may thicken and your skin may peel from the wonderful Bleomycin you'll be taking. There is also an increased risk for lung disease and lung malfunction from Bleomycin. The other drugs in your prescription can cause severe numbing to the fingertips and toes to the point of needing assistance in buttoning your shirt, which may or may not be permanent. You will ultimately be faced with bouts of constipation, diahphrea, extreme fatigue, lightheadedness and loss of appetite .Nausea will be the most persistant symptom and most essential in trying to control over the course of your treatment. Not to save the best for last but you will also be at a higher risk for developing leukemia and other different forms of cancer, which may ultimately be caused from the medicine I'm giving to you today." Obviously that wasn't all one paragraph she put together but a summation of what I was enlightened with this morning in our hour long pre chemo user discussion. Sounded like a lot of optimistic really great news to me.

After an hour of being given my nausea medicine it was time to start my first wave of Chemo. I don't think I have ever felt as personally violated in my whole life and have never had such a wandering regret as to if I was making a wrong decision as I did today when she administered four rounds of god awful toxins into my body. The drugs are so toxic the nurses where thick rubber haz mat gloves and eye protection in case of accidental exposure, they use extreme caution administering them through the IV because external skin contact can cause third degree burn like ulcers in a matter of seconds. "You're putting that stuff in my body"? I thought. The more and more I thought about it the more and more the potential risks of dieing trying to beat this the natural way using nutritional science and alternative methods seemed a better idea. After six and a half hours in a lazy boy lounge full of much older humans than I and beeping IV towers I was finally free to go. And off I went feeling as free as a lab at the dog park after a week locked in the yard.

So here I am, feeling defeated and undermined, encouraged and optimistic. I was not initially planning to run a blog about my daily life as a cancer patient but after today I realize that this is going to be the best way for me to let out my thoughts and emotions, because I most certainly don't do well verbally. So from here on out, if you're here reading this thanks for checking in on me.