We’re going to be upping the ante on this disease. Beginning Wednesday, I begin something called PUVA therapy. Consider it a somewhat benign cross between radiation and chemo therapy. I take a drug, methoxasalen two-and-a-half hours or so before being put into a UVA light box for 15 minutes. The period of time will never…
I’ve been off the Halobetasol for over a week now. We still don’t know if the new eruptions are spread of the CTCL or if they’re a reaction to the steroid cream. I’ve had several doctor’s appointments yesterday and today, and one was to Dr. Fell. He rebiopsied me in the area of one of…
âWhen the moon hits your eye like a big pizza pieâ never struck me as the height of poetic imagery, but I never appreciated what a travesty those lyrics were until this morning. I was about five minutes into my trip to work, running about five minutes late. I wasnât particularly worried about the late…
I’d emailed Dr. Fell the day before to ask about the stinging of the steroid cream when I applied it, and he wrote back to say he wanted to speak to me. Then I awoke yesterday morning to find two new eruptions of the rash, one on each thigh, each about half the size of…
I’ve been looking for cat ornaments for a few years now for my “Cat Christmas Tree”. The tree itself is a little Charlie Brownish, but it’s sufficient for my purposes at present. Eventually I’ll get a nicer Christmas tree for my ornaments, but since the ornament collection is still a tad sketchy, the tree does…
This has been a weekend of tidying up. Christmas has been banished to the basement for another eleven months of solitary confinement. Toilet bowels have been scrubbed. Kitchen accoutrements have been steel-wooled and degreased. Sofas have been curried free of lint, cat hair, and stuff I donât want to consider too closely. I washed windows…
Iâm still taking in textures, still surreptitiously fingering the velvet at Coldwater Creek and playing with the coffee beans when nobody is watching. Iâve lost a little of the manic optimism that I was carrying earlier, and Iâve lost a little of the crushing depression that set in last week. Iâm somewhere in-between now, tethered…
Wow. That was a lot of people asking a lot of questions that I don’t have the answers to. Now I’ll hope the topical treatments take care of the problem and it never rears its head again. I probably won’t be that lucky. This is something that can’t be cured, but can be controlled about…
Finally got the test results back from Dr. Fell yesterday. PET scan: Normal No detectable masses anywhere in my body. Flow cytology: Normal No detectable abnormal cells in my bloodstream. I’m staged at 1A: Cancer affecting less than 10% of my skin, with nothing in blood, lymph nodes or organs. I can live with that.
While I don’t tend to go out of my way to advertise it, it is also no secret that I am one of those unAmerican atheist types who believe that teaching creationism in school is bunk and feels that “one nation under God” is the ultimate in discriminatory hypocrisy in a nation that claims tolerance…