A Happy Thanksgiving

I enjoy cooking. Thanksgiving gives me a chance to play in the kitchen, and this year to extend playtime a few more days with some fresh shellfish. Sure, the turkey was pretty good this year (thanks to my brother Mike for the smoked turkey tips), but the lure of fresh oysters and clams makes even good leftover turkey take a back seat.

We spent Friday afternoon and evening with our friends, the Whites, digging razor clams down on the Washington coast. We didn't all catch our limits but my daughter Meredith (shown in picture) came close, and now has the title "clam whisperer". I'm a little off my game - the chemo has sapped my endurance and I get winded pretty easily, but I can't use that as an excuse for not making a limit - I just didn't see anything that looked like a clam this time out. So the student has now become the master. I did manage to catch a few, and insisted on photographic evidence, shown below as Exhibit B. That rosey glow and bright red honker is not my attempt to play Rudolph the Red-Nosed clam digger - yeah it's this week's latest set of side-effects (more later).

Exhibit B

Earlier in the day, I went up to Seattle with the Whites. While Susan watched their daughter march in the Thanksgiving parade, Tim and I hit Pike Place to track down a sampling of Pacific coast oysters (as promised in last week's post). The selection was limited to two varieties this time around, but that just means that we'll get to go back and try the rest later when they're more readily available. Tim is shown here picking out a dozen choice Kumamoto oysters.

Also available this time around were some nice Pacific oysters shown below before we slurped them down.








Our verdict? We liked the Kumamotos a lot - an unusually sort of creamy texture and almost a little on the sweet side - we'd definitely have them again. The Pacifics were a completely different taste - very briny, perhaps more than we had expected. We go camping every year with the Whites (and a bunch of other folks -many are fellow NC Staters) and dig clams and oysters. We're used to a different kind of oysters - Quilcenes and whatever the monster oysters are at Duckabush Flats on Hood Canal. Now that we've tried a few more, it will be interesting to see what we think of them when we return next June. And the razor clams - we had them today along with the oysters as clam chowder, boiled shrimp, along with Tim's scallops & orzo and fresh sauteed Chanterelle mushrooms. A good and filling time was had by all.

Now the lowdown on this week's treatment. I was puzzled and perhaps a bit concerned last week because I still hadn't had a reaction to my last treatment. I did have an amazing set of itches that were not particularly pleasant (and still aren't). But nothing else until Friday afternoon. As we headed for the coast, my face started feeling hot - just like the first go around with the "nuclear option". Uh oh. The pictures above on the beach show it starting as the rosey red glow, which later felt like someone taking a blowtorch to my skin. I apologize to anybody who saw me today - I look like a cooked lobster (perhaps my penance for consuming and enjoying the seafood???). The rest of the rashy skin breakout is now starting as I write this. The Jekyll and Hyde transformation begins again... A warning to my coworkers - I may not be pretty on Monday - the setting looks like it's going for maximum ugly again. I can't wait to see what I look like in the morning.....

A Bird of Paradise at a flower stall in Pike Place.

An apology to my nurses

It's always nice to spend a little more time at Pike Place Market. We stopped by for a little shopping to fill out the grocery/spice list for Thanksgiving dinner, after having stopped off at the hospital to have Silent Bob disconnected. I had a mission at the market - check out the shellfish. National Public Radio had a feature story about oysters last Tuesday night that stayed in my head all week. Many of our local bivalves were noted. I have decided that next weekend will have to be devoted to shellfish appreciation, with a sampling of all of the different local oysters (and one or two from further away) - Kumamotos, Olympias, Penn Coves, Quilcenes. The story is at http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=16250281. To get in the mood, I picked up a bag of Penn Cove mussels which ended up as lunch today, steamed in Belgian beer and shallots. And next weekend is also the second short season of the fall for razor clamming, so I expect to snap up a few of the elusive clams (really, they are elusive - they really do move quickly as you try to excavate them).

A relatively uneventful week at the treatment clinic this week. I think I owe my nurse this week, Jenny B, an apology for being a difficult patient. She was working with a new nurse to the oncology group and did an excellent job explaining the four-page list of pre-medications and medications to be administered that day. But like I said, I'm a difficult patient - it's not that I cause trouble, but I guess I'm a little more sociable than most of the patients. It's not unusual for other patients to come and visit me, or for me to go visit other patients for a chat. It's a way for us to stay connected with each other, compare notes on treatment, and offer a sympathetic ear when things aren't going quite as well as hoped. But I think it makes a little more work for the nurses, trying to keep track of us all, as our IV trees sound off and they try to figure out who needs to have a bag of meds changed out. And it's probably a lot more work if you're trying to provide instruction to a new person and your patient keeps moving around on you. The nurses do a pretty good job of adapting to our mobile ways, and if I end up parked at a different station, somebody else will keep an eye on me until I go back to my own chair. I offer an apology if I've made taking care of me more work than necessary.

My treatment puzzles me. My first round of the nuclear option fries my skin, and then the following round does nothing except make me too tired to stay awake. And with virtually no obvious skin rash this time, I guess the latest set of numbers are not a surprise with an increase up to 8.6 from the previous 5.4. So now I wait to see what the third round will bring - itches, rashes, fatigue - who knows what I'll end up with this time.

Regardless of what ends up happening, I plan to enjoy a little time off for Thanksgiving, and hope that you enjoy it as well.

Zzzzzzzzzzzzz........

Maybe I'm taking last week's bear costume too seriously. Or maybe it's "method" acting and I'm still working through the part. Or maybe it's just the last round of chemo that has let me appreciate the benefits of hibernation. While black bears (Ursis americanus) are not true hibernators, they do go into a state of near-suspended animation for sometimes as long as 100 days. They usually don't leave their dens, and do not eat, drink or poop (does a bear s*it in the woods? Nope, not during hibernation) for the entire time. They're well insulated with their dense fur and thick body fat (OK, you can stop drawing comparisons already), and may lose a substantial amount of weight during hibernation, as they metabolize stored fat reserves (I did lose about 4 pounds on my last weigh-in).

Yep, that last round of the "nuclear option" was quite a bit different than the first one. No skin rash whatsoever so far, but I have been really, really tired and thinking that hibernation seems like a pretty good lifestyle right now. I can't say that I'm getting a good night's sleep, but I do seem to sleep a lot when I can get a chance, and if given that chance, I'll take it.

I sleep in the van-pool to and from work, I nap when I get home from work and nap after dinner until it's time to go to bed. I'm hoping that this too will pass, or probably until I go back for another dose on Thursday. The complete lack of a skin rash (other than that amazing and constant itch) is a bit puzzling, and while I don't really want to get it, it has me wondering if the chemo is still working. I have a theory as to why the first round of the "nuclear option" was so severe - I had a dose of Erbitux the week before I started the double-dose. From past experience, I know that it takes a few weeks to get it out of my system, so I already had some still working on me when I got the first double-shot. Note to self: Next time, take a little break before ramping up the dosage.

I've been struggling with articulating my thoughts (and not just from chemo-brain) on my last visit for treatment. It was tough for me to come in after having my worst experience with side effects to date. But that's not what was so difficult about this particular visit. What made this visit more difficult was the emotional wear and tear that cancer causes has started to show a bit. The job of being a valiant cancer warrior eventually wears down patients and their families. Maybe it just seemed more noticeable this time. Life through the "cancer goggles" sucks.

Seasonal musings

This time of year, I get to celebrate three things in the span of a few days. Halloween on Wednesday (some of which you have seen in last week's posting - sorry if you weren't able to open the pumpkin slingshot video clip), the Mayan El Dia De Los Muertos (Day of the Dead) on Thursday, and my birthday on Friday.

Halloween was celebrated at home with usual dispensing of candy treats to make the neighborhood kids wired with sugar overload, and at work with some costumery. Our original plan at work was to poke a little fun at the newly painted interior of our building, which was redone in what we felt was in an institutional palette - like a correctional institution. So 42 of us ordered bright orange jumpsuits and stencilled "INMATE" on the back. This almost worked, but someone in the building thought that it would be "disrespectful", and we got an email from Human Resources that the jumpsuits were out. Well, maybe out for most people, but I still had to get one picture with the jumpsuit on in the office.

The alternate costume was a bear - back at the end of last May, a wild black bear was running through the south Puget Sound, and it was finally captured and tranquilized on our campus. So I became "Columbus the Travelling Bear" for the day.

The ID badge bore the disclaimer "In no way is this costume intended to disrespect bears or other members of the Ursidae Family".

Closeup of the "tranquilizer dart" stuck into my rump.

The Day of the Dead is a celebration to honor the deceased in Mayan culture, and still celebrated in Mexico and some Latin American countries. It is my opportunity to celebrate another year beating cancer and not joining the ranks of the deceased just yet (remember "I'm not Dead Yet"?). The good folks at Rogue Brewing in Newport OR brew up a nice ale to commemorate the holiday - Dead Guy Ale, and I use this as part of my celebration.

The birthday part - I celebrated my 50th trip around the sun this year, which by my calculations, comes to approximately 28.2 billion miles. We'll defer this year's celebration for a few days while my body adjusts to last Thursday's round of treatment.

This week's marker number is back down at 5.4, and we'll see if I get the same terribly unpleasant Jekyll and Hyde transformation that I got with the last double dose of Erbitux, which I have now come to call "the nuclear option".

"Bob - what has happened to your skin?"