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

Blimey - a whole month since my last post.  Disgusting.  So, what's been happening?  On the health front, remarkably little.  Trump & Co are still trying to kill me off which will be a bit easier now that John McCain has died.  Although my myeloma is now in remission, the folks at Cancer Care of WNC have kept me on 15mg of Revlimid a day.  I'm going up there tomorrow to have an armful taken - maybe they'll drop the dose if the results come back looking good.  Not that the Revlimid has desperately horrible side effects - considering I am taking meds for high blood pressure and old guy's prostate, it's hard to attribute any side effect to a particular med.  If you read the warnings online, it looks like everything causes tiredness, aches and pains, diarrhea, constipation and all the other things that make dating fun. It's been horribly hot and humid here this summer, interspersed with bucketing rain.  So much of my fitness regimen has been...

Dear World - I am retired. That means I stay in bed till 10 having had breakfast served there by Susan before she goes to work. I then get up and go to IHOP for a real breakfast. Then it's off to the bowls club for a game and a couple of pints and a steak sandwich. Nap time until getting up around 2 to watch Casablanca again. Another nap until Susan comes home to cook my dinner, followed by Casablanca again because I can't remember what happened. It doesn't mean getting up at 7:30 to enjoy fighting over the newspaper with Susan followed by a handful of pills with weird side effects. It also doesn't include getting ready to watch Casablanca only to have the drywall guy who was coming late next week phone to ask me if it was OK if he came this afternoon instead. No problem - I didn't have a pile of my tools in the room he wanted to put the drywall in. Oh, hang on - yes I did. There should be no need for me to finish a load of framing around what used t...

How do I feel? Two and a bit years into my multiple myeloma, it’s probably time to sum up how I am feeling.   For starters, I am feeling indescribably grateful to the people at Cancer Care of WNC and Wake Forest Baptist Health for fixing me.   And to Susan for putting up with my flaky, forgetful behavior and for driving endless miles up and down I-40 to Wake Forest.   Not to mention Sam for his patience in hearing for the nth time “No, I really don’t fancy going to the soccer field” and for dragging me out to the soccer field anyway.   End of Oscars speech coming up.   Above all, my thanks to President Obama for making this so financially survivable for us – my meds cost $13,800 a month and, were it not for him, I would have had to make the choice between bankruptcy and dying.   But how do I feel physically and mentally?    Let’s start with mentally.   When all this started in early 2017 or thereabouts, I was constantly asked if I...

Last Monday I went to Cancer Care here in Asheville for a bone marrow biopsy.  This involves drilling a small hole in my right hip and sucking out a couple of tablespoons of bone marrow along with a small piece of bone.  They then get sent to a lab where they look for signs of myeloma.  It's an unpleasant procedure though, here in Asheville, they give you a decent dose of happy juice first.  It feels a bit like a dentist hitting a nerve while drilling only 10 times greater.  It also gives you new respect for anyone who has ever had a leg amputated without anaesthetic. Unlike my usual blood tests where I can read a chapter in the waiting room while they get done, this test takes a week to come back.  So yesterday I was more than delighted to get a brief email from Cancer Care saying " Normal marrow, no sign of myeloma".  Short and to the point. I don't know exactly what this means in terms of whether I have to keep guzzling expensive medicine forever ...

After a bit of nutty couple of months, life is threatening to return to normal.  Not that I'll be sitting on  the deck drinking beer and eating cheese & pickle sandwiches but at least I should have a clue what I am doing from day to day.  My medicine taking has become so routine that I sometimes forget to do it - must watch that.  Today was the last day of a Revlimid cycle so I should feel a bit more chipper as the week goes on, not that I walk around in a fug while I am taking the stuff.  Tomorrow I get to see the nice ladies at Cancer Care here in Asheville - they'll take an armful of blood and send the results to Wake Forest for my oncologist there to look at.  I then go to see him next week to hear how I'm doing  Apparently he has 24 appointments that day. Rather him than me. I'm keeping busy at home turning the big storeroom under our bedroom into a monster laundry.  This means that all the old boxes, Lego sets, roller coasters, CD cases...

Blimey - is it that long since I last posted here?  Shame on me.  So, what's new?  As the page title is meant to imply, I have been busy busy busy, far more so than I ever was when I was gainfully employed.  So, in no particular order, here's what I have been up to with varying degrees of pleasure (but all on the plus side). Tutoring About this time of year, many kids / parents realise that a decent math grade will be a good idea to take to college or next year at high school and so tutoring work ramps up.  I've been lucky this year with two bright new students whose Bs I am helping them turn into As.  It's good to know the old brain cells can kick into action when required (oddly enough, I have discovered that I can't remember the names of people I have met over the last couple of years but can still solve differential equations - at least first order ones - in my head.  Weird.)   Me and my big mouth If you've been to our house, you'll kn...

leather skin and the fingers of a three year oldHmmm.  Been a long time since the last post.  Nothing ominous about that - I had a few days feeling crappy in there somewhere and suffered from really gruesome jetlag upon my return to NC but I am really feeling fine. I had a lot of fun in NZ getting lab results - the results from some labs got emailed to me (or not) while other labs insisted on mailing them to me for security reasons.  The mailed results never arrived so I hope whoever got them enjoyed them.  So, having had a couple of weeks to recover from the NZ trip, I trotted off to Cancer Care of WNC to find that all my blood numbers are pretty healthy - a couple a bit out of whack and most of them towards the lower end of the  "acceptable" range but nothing to set the alarm bells ringing.  I will have a quick whinge about the format of the new reports, though - the old ones came in a simple table form, one line per item.  It is all now laid out "p...