Category Archives: Personal

Not making it up

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It’s been a while since I’ve had the energy or motivation to post an update here. It’s not necessarily through a lack of desire, but whenever I think about doing so I’m usually away from my desk and when I’m at my desk these days I’m generally working.

Excuses, excuses. Not like I was filling this blog with tons of content in the first place.

I’ll start by copying and pasting an update I sent to my immediate family recently…

The tumor did not respond to chemotherapy. This was kind of expected, as the type of tumor I have (Islet Pancreatic Neuroendocrine Tumor, or PNET) tends to have very thick cell walls that the chemotherapy medication has a hard time penetrating, so this isn’t “bad” news. My doctors have concluded, however, that there isn’t much point in continuing down this path and we are moving on to the next step which, most likely, will be surgery.

The major complication to the already complicated surgery I’m having is that one of my blood vessels has been blocked (occluded) by the tumor. They are going to have to do a lot of work to correct that, and it may require them to take my entire pancreas along with my spleen instead of just removing the head of my pancreas (something known as a Whipple procedure). If that happens? I get promoted to Type 1 Diabetes and become insulin and enzyme dependent for the rest of my long, natural life.

I don’t have any dates yet, but the goal is to have me in there relatively soon. When it happens I’ll be in the hospital for at least seven days, and it will be six weeks or more before I return to work. Due to the protocols still in place since the Pandemic and other health factors I won’t be able to have any visitors while I’m in the hospital other than Lisa.

I’m not sure where I’d be in all this without Lisa, and not only from an emotional support standpoint. She’s been an absolute champion in terms of keeping me on track with my medications, handling all the different logistics of coordinating with multiple medical facilities, and generally making sure I can focus on just resting and saving my limited energy reserves for keeping up at work. When I get through to the other side of this, her involvement and support will have played a major role in my success. Hell, I wouldn’t even have known I had this if she hadn’t encouraged me to talk to my doctor about why my blood pressure and iron was so low every time I went to give blood. I mention all of this in particular because, right now, there’s nothing we really need or that anyone can do for us. Keep us in your thoughts, keep yourselves happy and healthy, and understand that if you don’t hear much more about this until after the fact it’s because things are moving fast and we need to focus on making sure we take care of everything that needs to happen to make it a success.

On the one hand, I’m thrilled to be off of chemotherapy, because chemotherapy sucks. I didn’t have it as bad as folks who have to go into a hospital setting five days a week, but I absolutely had side effects from the treatment that were really rough to live with. The worst was just the general lack of energy. I was tired all the time, regardless of how much sleep I got every night. I also lost my fingerprints at one point (a very odd but incredibly common side-effect of one of my chemo medications), had occasional bouts of chemo mouth (metal taste in my mouth that ended up making me decide to use nothing but plastic silverware), and all sorts of fun gastrointestinal issues. The fact that I won’t have to deal with that any more is thrilling and a cause for great rejoicing.

But then there is that whole surgery thing.

I’ve spent a lot of time feeling like I was being melodramatic about my cancer over the last year. That because it was “only” stage 1 and wasn’t in and of itself a particularly lethal type of cancer it was wrong for me to make such a big deal out of it. That’s really messed with my head as I’ve tried to navigate all the ways in which my life has changed since the diagnosis. Was I using my cancer as an excuse? Was I just trying to milk sympathy out of others that was undeserved? Was I being a cancer fraud?

Yep. Even when it comes to cancer I’ve got imposter syndrome.

Well, when we met with my surgeon last week all of those feelings went away. The scope of the procedure I’ll be undergoing is huge, and the recovery from it is going to be long. When it’s over, I’m going to have to learn how to navigate the world in a completely new way. Considering the size of the tumor, the fact that I have not developed liver cancer is, as described by my surgeon, “weird.” The occlusion of my blood vessel is a Really Big Deal which, thankfully, my body has corrected the best way that it can but that is not sustainable in the long term.

Reality hit me hard last week, and the speed with which this is all going to get very real is intimidating.

On top of all that I’ve been dealing with some other very personal stuff that I won’t go into detail about publicly but that has had a tremendous toll on my mental health on top of everything else. So much so that, combined with the cancer shit, my therapist and I decided I should go back on Wellbutrin for a while. I haven’t been on anti-depressants since I got divorced back in 2000.

I got sick (again) this last weekend and it took a day or two for me to fully recover. For the first time since my diagnosis, I really felt like I had something wrong with me.  That I was ill. Prior to that I was putting it all on the chemotherapy, but that’s out of my system now. I’m not well, and it’s not all in my head, and it’s a Big Fucking Deal. The fact that it is “little c” cancer doesn’t change the fact that I have a giant tumor in my abdomen that needs to come out and that the procedure to do so is incredibly invasive and will have life-changing effects on me. The fact that it is “little c” cancer doesn’t make the impact to my health any less significant.

I’m not making this out to be more than it is in my head. If anything, I have not fully respected the magnitude of what I’m facing.

I meant what I wrote about Lisa. She’s been amazing, and so very patient with me. She’s turned her life upside down to make sure I have the best possible outcome in this scenario. I’ve also been lucky to have great insurance, wonderful doctors, and the means to pay for them. I’ve also got a great support network of friends who have been understanding of our inability to commit to plans and our need to frequently change them when we do.

It will be ok in the end. I believe that.

But things really are kind of hard and scary at the moment.

And that isn’t all in my head.

I can do this all day

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So on Tuesday night I got to spend about 20 minutes in the Shimberg with a few old friends and some folks I was excited to start working with. I know it was only about 20 minutes because I tested positive for COVID-19 and had to go home.

Friends, I’m about at my wits end.

The symptoms came on pretty fast. They had already started when I tested positive, but I hadn’t thought twice about the fact that I had a sore throat because the day before I had an Endoscopy. My assumption is that my immune system was compromised due to the number of invasive tests I’ve had lately, including the colonoscopy I had last week that probably wiped all the good gut biomes out of my system.

The symptoms have been mild-ish I suppose, but they have knocked me on my ass. The most persistent symptom I’ve had has been an incredibly sore throat, which seemed to peak overnight last night. I barely slept at all because the pain kept waking me up. No respiratory issues of note, and the sinus stuff seems to have passed. Dry cough, made more painful by the sore throat. Sitting up for extended periods makes me tired and I’ve got brain fog. Doctors have me on Paxlovid because of the cancer and my diabetes.

So yeah, this has pretty much sucked. Lisa has been taking amazing care of me and has, thankfully, remained asymptomatic with negative daily test results. We’ve split the house in two and when she comes back here to bring me things she has a KN95 on with a cloth mask to boot.

And y’all thought I was in my feels about this cancer situation before? This here pity party is an all night rave with no seats and $20 bottles of water. Honestly, what really upsets me the most about all this is that it pushed back my appointment at Moffitt and I really wanted to get that out of the way so I could figure out how my treatment is going to impact our lives in the next few months.

Now here’s a positive thing about all this – Many of you who have known me for a while have probably heard me talk about my first programming mentor, Wendell, and how one of the most valuable lessons he taught me was not to put my job before my health (he taught me this lesson by example…he worked himself to death). I was in the middle of writing a text message to Lisa about how I was going to “power through” the work I had to do on Wednesday before taking the rest of the day off. I realized I was heading down the path Wendell did and stopped that line of thought cold. I’m not dying because of my job, especially since EVERY co-worker I have has done nothing but emphasize how I need to focus on getting better.

You know, it’s kinda funny to me how the same thing keeps popping up in my head and has for the last few years. I’ve said for a long time that while Spider-Man is the super hero I find most relatable, Captain America is the one that inspires me. It’s kinda his thing, really. That scene in Avengers: Endgame comes to mind often and has a lot over the last three years. Oh come on, you know the scene I’m talking about if you’ve seen it. Cap has had his ass handed to him, his shield is broken, his friends are incapacitated, and he has a whole army coming his way. But he grimaces through the pain, tightens his broken shield on to his arm, and stands up to face what is coming. He doesn’t say it, but it’s the ongoing thread of “I can do this all day” that he has throughout his entire story arc. That’s where I’m at right now.

And when I’m done with my surgery and on the other side of this I’m getting myself a shield for my office.

A very brief health update…

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My first biopsy was negative (thyroid).

Next biopsy is Monday (liver/pancreas).

I am still asymptomatic for anything related to cancers in that area, but they saw a cyst big enough to warrant further investigation.

I feel like the iron supplements are starting to work and my energy levels are beginning to rise again. Still confident the ultimate issue is just going to be that I give blood too often, but will not be 100% sure if that until September after my Upper and Lower GI tests and my next set of labs.

Mentally I am drained but still feeling positive about the whole thing. Lisa combines her medical experience and research skills to be able to provide contextual answers for me when I rabbit hole too deep into bad “what if” scenarios. She also has a whole laundry list of questions she wants me to pose to our primary care doctor when this is all said and done about our lifestyle choices and what we might have done differently to prevent some of this. I strongly suspect my coffee intake is going to be an issue but for now I am refusing to acknowledge that possibility. I will cross that bridge when I officially cross into my 50’s this November. Damnit. In any case, she has been by my side through all of this and her support, as always, is a major contributor to my mental health.

This was not as brief as I intended it to be, but there it is.

The silence of shame

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Link courtesy of Anderz Printz via flickr.

So.

It has been a while since I posted here. Two months to the day, actually. After making all these bold statements about how I was changing the way the site was going to be presented and talked about how things were going to be different I just kind of…went away.

I wonder how many of you I even have left at this point?

I wish I could say that the reason I’ve been gone is because I’ve been so busy whipping my ass into shape that I couldn’t even squeeze time to write a post because I was too busy squeezing awesome out of every second of my day.

I wish I could say that.

I can’t.

Truth is? I’m struggling, friends.

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Starting Over

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It’s been a while, hasn’t it?

ShrinkGeek came into existence as a company just over two years ago. At the time I truly believed that by combining what was a great name and the talents of a small handful of my closest friends I’d be able to create a web site that was the go-to place for geeks to get their health and fitness information.

In some ways we were very successful. We managed to get a decent page rank out of Google. Rafe and I were hired to do a series of diet and fitness related articles for WoWInsider. We had several advertisers offer to pay us in exchange for links (and we even had the integrity to turn a few of them down because we didn’t think they fit with our image). We were given several products to review, and we got some decent interviews. Ultimately, I think we were able to produce some extremely stellar content.

Unfortunately we haven’t made any significant money in the process of doing so. In fact, when you factor in the costs associated with running the site as an actual business, we’ve operated at a loss the entire time. You know that old saying about how time equals money? Well, it takes a lot of time to produce quality content for a web site and when that time isn’t being rewarded by any money it gets harder to build up the motivation to actually devote the time necessary to do it.

Long story short? We burnt out.

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In Pursuit of the Pull-Up

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Photo by uuzinger

Photo by uuzinger

I have never, in my entire life, done a pull-up.

This is not an easy revelation for me to make.  The truth of the matter is that it’s downright painful.

Back when I was in Middle School (6th to 8th grades down here in Florida) physical education was a mandatory class that everyone had daily.  For some kids it was an excuse to get outside and have some fun during the school day.  For me it was a daily reminder of how much I sucked.  It was an opportunity for me to get picked on for how slow I was, how much I was sweating in the hot Florida sun, how I was horrible at team sports, and how ugly I looked when I didn’t have my shirt on.  The latter, of course, only happened on one of the very rare occasions when I would actually get up the nerve to “dress out.”  When I didn’t, which was most of the time, I got picked on instead because of how badly I smelled due to not taking a shower after class.

The absolute worst humiliation I had to endure during that time, however, was a direct result of The President’s Challenge.

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Retro Dieting – The Bad Old Days

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icanhascheezurger.com

icanhascheezurger.com

It has been often said that being optimistic is incredibly helpful when you are struggling to lose weight.  Admittedly, it is hard to be optimistic when you are faced with choking down that eighth glass of water for the day or you are trying to learn to love vegetables, but the fact of the matter is that modern dieters have it easy.  Not only do we have a plethora of products that are packaged to help us with portion control, but many diets these days are loaded with foods that are, quite frankly, delicious.

It wasn’t always this way, my friends.

I grew up in a dieting household.  When I was growing up my Mother (and, by extension, her children) took part in just about every diet craze that was out there.  I can recall tuna fish diets, grape fruit diets, diets that involved granular shakes, and diets that with daily calorie intakes that would have the Olsen Twins duking it out in a cage match over a Snickers at the end of the day.

But what I remember the most is the liver.

A lot has been said over the years about the medical benefits of eating liver.  From a health perspective, it is one of the best sources of Vitamin A, a compound that promotes healthy vision, bone growth, and assists in fighting off infections.  It is also thought to help regulate blood sugar and aid weight loss efforts.

It is also…well…liver.

Please understand – I don’t want to take anything away from those of you who actually like eating liver, but you have to admit that for a large number of people even the thought of eating liver is enough to bring on a serious case of the DO NOT WANTS.  That being said, there was a time when it was a regular staple in our household.  You see, back in the early 70’s the folks over at Weight Watchers decided it was so important to eat liver that it was REQUIRED that you do so at least once a week.  My Mother cleverly disguised it of course.  She never told us we were eating liver, but that we were eating braunschweiger.  It worked for a while, too, but eventually one of us actually read the packaging when she brought it in from the store and the jig was up.

The other day my Mom gave me a Weight Watchers cookbook from the early 80’s.  By this point in the program history they had moved away from requiring liver, but it was still a pretty big focus of the recipe book – so much so that Liver has its very own section.  Now I’m all for trying new things, but some of these recipes sound downright revolting, but my “favorite” has to be the Fruit ‘N’ Rice-Filled Liver.

In fact, I’m so grossed out by this particular recipe I’m gonna share the love.

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