Bring on the festoons and hoopla. It's the first birthday of this blog! I posted the first update exactly a year ago today. And how much snappier and technologically advanced it is now compared to a year ago. You may recall that my first post was actually a clay tablet that I 
inscribed with a papyrus reed in cuneiform, but this was much too difficult transmit electronically - the clay was much too heavy for typical bandwiths and took forever to upload and download, and dial-up was damn near impossible. Now we have links to other sites, the embedded video clip (that kind of worked for most readers), and a subscription link. Now if I could only figure out how to add a soundtrack - I'm working on it.Some readers wondered what all the fuss was about in my last post about my "port". The port is a stainless steel and silicone device that is implanted in my right shoulder, and gets "accessed" every time I receive chemotherapy. A needle is pushed through the skin over the port (it doesn't hurt as much as you might imagine, even though the needle is big enough to use for upholstery), and into a blob of silicone rubber that covers the steel disk.
This disk has a catheter that is implanted into my superior vena cava, which is the large vein that returns blood to my heart. When I receive fluids intravenously through the port, it is reaches the heart in less than a second and then pumped throughout my body almost immediately.The problem I had last week was that a small flap of tissue about the size of my thumbnail grew over the end of the catheter and clogged it so that no fluids could go in or out. If the flap were smaller, the injection of the "rattlesnake venom" (which is not really venom anymore - they use genetically engineered e. coli bacteria to make the stuff) would have have dissolved the tissue and cleared the catheter.
But there was too much stuff to dissolve away, so the surgeon fished it out by entering the femoral vein in my thigh with a thin wire and cutting off the flap and pulling it back out. I'm still pretty amazed they can do stuff like that. Next time, I'll have him install an MP3 player (IPod or Zune?) under my arm and I'll have something to listen to when I have to sit in the big green chair during infusion time.I go back for another round this Thursday, and I'll get a new set of marker numbers. I'm still feeling the effects of the last round I received a week and a half ago (the return of the "burning face"), so it must be doing something.
And finally, a plug for colorectal cancer awareness. The good folks at the Colon Club publish a clever calendar every year called the Colondar. It features colorectal cancer survivors and patients. Buy a Colondar today - who knows, maybe you'll see someone you know in it. You can find them at: http://www.colonclub.com/colondar.html
