Will you still love me to-marrow - John Mycroft and Multiple Myeloma

Not the usual cliche of a rollercoaster ride, it's struck me that I have been slowly getting on a rollercoaster for the last month or so.  First of all, an interminably long wait full of anticipation of what is to come.  Then eventually stepping into the rollercoaster car and feeling a bit excited.  Then doing up the safety belt and realising that this thing isn't all that comfortable.  And finally waiting for the guy in charge of the thing to come and check your seat belt is done up properly - this is where I am at now, having been to Wake Forest last week and examined from almost very possible direction.  Wake Forest very efficiently posted all my results on my personal wee website so I can keep track of things - all the numbers look fine to my uneducated eye, all having moved in the right direction except some of those they told me might go the wrong way. So now I sit and wait for the coaster to start its slow chug up the hill to the first precipitate drop....

Susan & I drove over to Winston-Salem last night, leaving Sam home alone for the first time.  Haven't heard from the Asheville emergency services so we assume he emptied the fridge, played computer games until sunrise and is now sleeping it off.  In case you've forgotten (or haven't followed every enthralling episode), my transplant doesn't involve two operating tables and a dead body - they take my blood, filter out the stem cells and then, after they've been nasty to me for a few days, give me my stem cells back again.  Apparently they wipe out my immune system completely to the point where I am once again vulnerable to all those things I had as a kid like measles, mumps and chicken pox. Today has been an endless series of tests, starting with a nice chat with the psychologist to make sure I wasn't completely nutty as a fruit cake and then moving on to having 24 test tubes of blood taken from my right arm (shades of Tony Hancock).  Then a chest x-ray, a m...

No, nothing morbid.  Today I had the last IV infusion of chemo for my current pre-transplant treatment.  The folks at Wake Forest want my blood to be clean of other chemo so they can work their magic on it with no fear of cross-contamination.  So that means that, over the next 24 days, I am injected with nothing, swallowing nothing and all that stuff I have been injected with gets peed down the drain (more expensive than going on the booze at the Trump Hotel).  I wonder if I can have a couple of legit beers?  It is going to be interesting in the extreme to see how healthy I now am.  Am I a bit shaky because of the melanoma or because of the treatment?  Also my inclination to crawl into bed at 9 pm. I must admit I will miss the lovely people at Mercy Hospital, especially my Commonwealth Cousin.  Perhaps I'll drop in for a shot of saline for old times' sake. Monday is evaluation day to see if I am tough enough to take the treatment....

... to quote the old English soccer supporters'' song.  The time for popping expensive pills ($50,000 plus thus far, the vast majority of which has been paid by Medicare (which the GOP want to get rid of but we'll let that one pass), is over and it's time to get serious.  So, starting tomorrow, I head for a stem cell transplant.  Tomorrow sees me having a bone marrow biopsy which literary involved drilling me a second hole in my bum to extract a chunk of my pelvis from.  I get a decent jab of happy juice (I had one about 6 months ago) and it's not too bad a procedure but it does feel like you've been kicked up the butt once the local wears off. This is followed a couple of weeks later by a full day of lab and physical tests to make sure I'm strong enough to survive the transplant (I am reassuringly told I don't seem to have any problem or the docs would not be considering it).  Once those tests start, my life switches to one that is 50-50 at home in Ash...

Always ready for a road trip, this weekend saw a busload (and three carloads of various sizes) of students, teachers and parents from Carolina Day School head for the NCTC one act play competition in Boiling Springs.  Most people left school at 7 a.m. Friday but I stuck around until after lunch as I had a full morning teaching and was driving on my own - there's always a nagging doubt that I'll get halfway somewhere and decide I've gone far enough which would not be a good plan if I had half the cast in tow. Friday was an unspeakably lovely day here - the sun was out, the sky a deep blue and, had I not had Fleeetwood Mac and John Mayall playing just a touch too loud, I could probably also remark that the birds were singing.  I had all afternoon to do the hour and a half drive so, just to piss off my GPS, I took the country route, navigating by compass until I figured I was about 30 miles from Boiling Springs when I finally let the GPS have its own way.  I headed out th...

Last Wednesday Susan and I took a trip to Wake Forest Baptist Hospital to check in with their cancer experts.  It was more or less good news all round though I was glad Susan took the time off work to drive me there - I was nearly asleep on the way back.  It's also absolutely essential to have her around as her ability to remember detail is far better than mine.  So if any of the following makes no sense, it's my fault, not the hospital's. The next step in my treatment is to have another month-long cycle of chemotherapy (or two), followed by a stem cell transplant.  If you've been paying attention you'll know that I don't need a donor but thank you to the people who have offered to be donors.  They take my own blood, remove a bunch of stem cells - they'd like 10 million but must have at least 2 million - and then put the blood back into me.  I get to stay in hospital for about a week to keep me away from sick people (odd logic) and so that I'm cl...

Got to school bright and early ready for a full day at my desk (even though the skinflints pay me less than half pay).  Opened up the laptop and stared blankly at the logon screen - I had no bloody idea what my password was.  After a few abortive attempts at old passwords, random pokes at the keyboard and so on, Windows finally locked me out - "see your system administrator".  OK - I needed the exercise so up the hill I trudged to pound on the only locked door on the campus.  They couldn't get it open so they were clearly having as good a day as I was. So I went to the head coach's office and phoned them.  "Leave it to us - we'll change your password to blahblah and you log on with that and then change it to something you have never used before.  OK - back to my room and logged in with blahblah and changed it to something I may remember.  Needless to say, while all this was going on I remembered my old password but Windows wouldn't let me use that aga...