File: mayday.txt
Cont: Captain Slog, Blahdate 20045.1
It's may. Things are getting a little bit colder. But no rain. I hope you
liked the nuke mag' resonance picture of the psycho kidney. I tried to
scan in the transverse CT of my neck, so you could look at Bill-the-met in
all his necrotic glory, but the flatbed scanner just wouldn't resolve it.
Oh well. It's just a blob anyway. Remembered, perhaps as The Blob That Ate
Predator.
Sunday night I caught up with Liisa and Max, her hard-smokin' Finnish dad.
They're off to Kyogle and I'm staying in Skidney. Liisa's not gonna be
capable of rug rattery anytime soon since it appears she's been poisoned
into amenorrhoea by various nasty fumes'n'shit at her previous place of
employ. She still looks pretty thin and even feels bony when we hug. Arrr.
But her hair has grown back and she's not totally caved in like she used
to be. I slung her some RAM to stick in her 'poota and we had a chat at
the Harp pub (where she was glassed some months ago) about stuff in
general.
I hate how much of a disintegrating old coot I sound like when I mention
here in the rant that I have this vague pain in my right lower back.
Normally I'd not give a shit but arr, the great thing about cancer is you
can get paranoid about all the usual aches and pains which accompany your
life, so I wonder if it isn't some sort of carcinogenic cookie monster
come to munch on my spine or somethin'.
-----
It's tuesday now as I write. I have no idea what I got up to on Monday,
tho the cat meeting was a good'un. We're getting on top of those parts of
the system's unreliability which we can control. Since we have two links
Soz is gonna write some supervisory scripts to route stuff out on
whichever one happens to work. Leah (to whom I loaned my copy of "A
Natural History of Rape") and I had a verbal wrestle wherein she mentions
she believes that biology can't exist without culture. I just don't have
it in me to fall over laughing my pants off about such a comment any more.
Name a single celled organism which gives a shit about art.
Oh, yeah. Monday. I remember now. I met Joss' mum in a cafe at Carillion
Avenue. She gave me a load of stuff to read and accompanied me to see Dave
Eisinger, who's a renal cancer specialist (I think this means he watches
more people die of it than other people). We chatted about a lot of stuff.
He reckons we should chase whatever mets we find. Bill-the-Lump has
certain advantages, he sez, insofar as we can use him as a straightforward
diagnostic indicator of wether or not any treatments I might try are
having any useful influence. I'd prefer this particular diagnostic
indicator was somewhere the fuck else, like oh, in my left little toe, so
I didn't have to worry about losing any really important shit if it
decides to go prognostic instead. I want bill out of my bod. I wanted it
out six months ago. Eisinger suggests they shoot me full of radioactive
glucose and see what bits of my body metabolise it fastest, with a PET
scanner (tumors love glucose and short carbs). So we can spot any of
Bill's other relatives - they'll look like Bill in the scan, wherever it
is in my body they happen to show up.
He felt my guts and said it felt lumpy. I suspect this might have been
because of dinner or general skinniness or fibrous tissue encapsulation of
the little bits of steel in my guts. I hope so anyway.
I'd spent a few days freakin' out about Bill once I found out he'd blocked
my left jugular 'cos that sort of implied he might be going for a carotid
artery next.
Thought process table entry for pred, freaking out about Bill:
Fuck, fuck, fuck, fuck, fuck, oh, FUCK!!, fuck, arrrgh, fuck, fuck, FUUUCK!
I finally got the detailed clues about what Bill is full of:
"The aspirate is cellular and consists of numerous malignant cells in a
predominantly dispersed pattern and some poorly cohesive sheets. The
cells have eccentrically placed nuclei with irregular nuclei,
hyperchromatic granular chromatin, multiple macronucleoli and a moderate
amount of finely vacuolated cytoplasm. Mitoses and abundant necroses are
also noted. The appearances are those of a metastatic high-grade
carcinoma with features favouring a renal primary.
Did the patient have clear cell renal carcinoma and was it Fuhrmann grade 4?
(yes, actually, but I think I told them that)
Malignant cells in the sections of the cell block are positive for
cytokeratins (Cam 5.2 and AE1/AE3) and vimentin. This supports the
diagnosis of metastatic renal cell carcinoma."
Woohoo, some molecular data. Great. I have no idea what vimentin is yet.
I calmed down a lot when I cracked open Grays Anatomy (after attending the
cat meeting), and checked out the drawings of cranial arterial supply.
There's this arterial loop called the circle of Willis and it's fed by
both carotids and a couple of other rearward arteries whose names I can't
remember. Everything in yer brain is fed off this loop, but due to its
redundant feed architecture blood can flow around it in whatever direction
the pressure profile requires. So if I lose a carotid feed I probably
won't drop off the horizon immediately. I dont know if I should hope for
this or not.
Natch if a big chunk o' Bill decides to detach, float upwards and block
some the stuff coming off the circle, that could be a total catastrophe
for whatever it happens to block since there's no redundant supply beyond
that. In some scenarios, the neurons housing the personality writing this
rant will die, and that will be the end of the screed. Welcome to Planet
Brain Damage. Proceed directly to Hell. Shit. Oh, wait! I have a card from
Polyester Books, sez Get Out Of Hell Free! Cool. Remind me to have that
surgically implanted sometime.
I notice I more frequently suffix some of my paragraphs with a profanity.
Shit.
I wonder, to myself, if I am still in denial. I look around my room, it's
not the room of someone who's cleaned up in preparation for their final
departure. Shit.
I still go to specialists and they still don't tell me anything useful.
Yeah, it's gratuitous. Shit. Shit. Shit.
Bugger. EMI and Warner have deleted Goldfrapp's Felt Mountain album,
already. It's this sort of misbehaviour which makes me even more motivated
to rip off the record companies by copying their stuff. If they won't sell
it I'll steal it. Fuck'em.
I rang up the switch at RPA and it rang for a long time before anyone
answered. I asked them to patch me through to their nuke medicine section.
They also took a long time to answer the fone so I hung up. I dialled the
switch again and got their number and rang that myself. They told me that
some or other referring specialist had to fill in a form. Now, that's
Eisinger but his take was that I should talk to a Prof Boyer before the
PET scan happens, even though Eisinger's recommendation is that we chase
mets and the best way to find 'em is with the PET scanner. It shits me
that I need to hear the same stuff from another doctor. PETs are a bit
dear, too, circa $1k per throw. Arr, what the hell. Jab me with atomic
waste, light 'em up, those mets. I'm still not ready to see what the
ghostly antielectrons might have to show me.
---
Wednesday 5th. I've got the 'flu. At 10:35 I put mum on the back of the
'cycle and rode out to see Mary, who was stoked that we came out to see
her. Then we both wandered around the Waverley Cemetary, which is strewn
with monuments to people's lifelong fear of a god they believed to exist,
and also with evidence of granite, picrite and sandstone masonry pissing
contests, to show who had the best family vault and worshipped god in
a more hard-core manner than the next stiff. Wankers. The best stone of
the lot was an unassuming slab o' black granite engraved with a picture of
a sloop and the words "I'd rather go sailing." We went to Newtown and
sucked coffee again. Then whizzed off to HellaTurella (I scored a
replacement wankerfone aerial off someone's installation artwork). Then
home. Back out to STUCCO to shotgun cannabis smoke off George and Paddy
before gigglingly slapping in a network card in someone's very dusty
pentium1, win95 machine. A delightful day. Except I dribbled a lot of snot
and felt like shit.
Thursday I woke up with my face snot-welded to the pillowcase and my
turbinates full of something like solyent green, fucking yucko. This is
not a recreational strain of the 'flu... it's ascorbate time, I went up
the pharmo and bagged a big jar of it. I did a CPU transplant on the ol'
Robo608 board, so now it goes at half a GHz and is worth keeping around
for a while longer. I roped it to my pack and dropped it into Turella. On
the way I popped in at the pathologist to have yet another 21-gague canula
stuffed up my arm and blood sucked out.
Then I went around to my old squat. It's knee-deep in grass and full of
scavenged, low-technology junk. Her droopy-eyed grey brindled dog barked a
lot before Req answered the door. She squatted with me for a while back in
2002, and aside from that she appeared to live entirely on tinned beef
stroganoff, I never thought there was anything unusual about her ('cept
for the time when she tried to walk through the back door without opening
it). She was squatting the derilect Masonic centre on Regent st a couple
of years before that... I arranged a bodgy mains power supply for 'em so
they could have light and power points and hot water. They activated every
air-conditioner in the place, on full blizzard mode, which made me laugh.
She knew I was coming around 'cos I'd SMS'd her boyfriend in advance.
She's caved-in like Liisa was, and wears black. Black pants with the arse
falling out of them and the knees worn out. Black vest. Black shirt. Black
belt. Black sort of suits her in a nomenclatural way. Black history, I
think.
We sorta weren't looking at each other when we were doing the
re-acquaintance small talk. So I got straight to the point. Was she in a
position to acquire half a gram of smack, white, i.v. grade, and was she
up for a spotter's fee? Her eyes sorta bugged out for a couple of seconds.
What'd I want it for, why so much? I filled her in on what the story was
with big bad Bill. She asked several times if I wasn't drunk or nutz or
something. Then told me she couldn't use the stuff any more. After ten
years of junk use, they'd implanted slow-release naltrexone in her
abdominal wall. But yeah. It might take a couple of hours (man, you find
me anything else which has this short a supply turnaround) but yeah. Hang
around.
I tend not to trust smackies, 'cos they have motivation to lie, steal yer
stuff, and so on. I figured $160 was a cheap price to learn about wether
or not Req was straight up or not. I read Zen Flesh Zen Bones while the
dog sat on the couch, chewing its fleabitten genitals. The sun fell over
the western horizon. I sunk into the tattered leather couch, and
slept.
A couple of hours later I awoke as the dog snarled at the sound of
someone's approach. She showed up with a small clear snaplock baggie
containing what looked like a small chunk of ceiling plaster. Half a gram,
white, a bit pocked, hard as hell. It was a bit more than the usual ask,
and cost a bit more than we expected, so it took a bit longer and so I
coughed another twenty bucks. I paid the bux; get the right stuff, do the
job properly, business is business. Quality, along with everything else,
is forgotten shortly after you've forgotten the price. You're sure you're
not drunk, yer serious right, she kept asking. Come on dude, this is one
of the most serious transactions of my life, I didn't come here to jerk
you around, don't jerk me around either. Yeah, ok.
I didn't expect the tutorial but I was glad of it. She sat down, took off
her belt, got a spoon and some salt for demonstration purposes. Told me to
filter the stuff through a ciggie butt or a clean tampon or something
else. Flick it a bit to get the air out. 27 gague needle, 60mL, smaller
the gague the more likely the stuff'd recrystallise in the cannula and the
more resistance you get forcing the plunger down. Lotsa good sterile
technique in there, swab this, boil that. Don't heat the stuff, but
sterilise the water. Bend the spoon neck a bit so the stuff doesn't fall
out. If the rock is hard you can crush it with another spoon. She said
she'd kill for my veins, which stood out prominently. Go close to the
elbow crease. Avoid other veins recently punctured. Aim centrally to the
vein. Keep the cannula point down and the hollow surface up. Shallow
angle. Choose somewhere which isn't a lump, which is probably a valve. She
did it all with the visible ease of someone who has done it a thousand
times before, like her arms knew what they had to do. It'll take practise
before you can do it reliably, she said. She got the shivers remembering
this sequence of actions and what followed it. Ya just gotta take yer hat
off to people who don't try and talk you out of injecting yourself with a
ticket to Rookwood. Shelf life indefinite. You won't get any time to get
sick on this stuff. Make damn sure you get it all up the spout though,
don't wanna be half-full and drop the stuff, or you won't die and you'll
get brain damage.
I packed the rock in my bag [Trafficable Quantity, Possession Carries A
Custodial Sentence] and made to leave. Thanks dude. I kissed her on the
forehead, my angel of death, tears seeped down my nasal ducts where my
faint sniffling could be plausibly passed off as a consequence of this
'flu I have. She will never get any cred for providing me with this stuff,
having the guts to be the intermediary agent by which I will be painlessly
freed. She deserves a medal. No. We pin that stuff on people who do really
important, life-changing stuff, like ... you know... run around a fucking
athletics field. She walked me out to where I was parked. If there was
anything I needed, just ask. Well... a gas chromatograph of this stuff
would be nice but I didn't think I was gonna get it. Wrong kind of
industry.
I rode the 'cycle around to the Sydney Uni library and found out the
Lubeck Uni team were using tumor cells, extracted, incubated with
interferon gamma, cryogenically killed and then autologously injected.
Whoah.
I came home and ate a can of shitake mushrooms and went to bed. I woke up
in a newly updated puddle of snot. Showering (my first in a week, I'd
claim water restrictions and all that, but really it just boils down to
that I couldn't be fucked getting out of my clothes sometimes) didn't make
me feel any better but it did wash the biofilm off my face. I should have
stayed in bed, really, I did fuck-all of any significance during the
daylight. Well, actually I did find my quartz crucible, my thermometer, a
bunch of tapered boro' pipettes, a spray can of xylocaine. I couldn't find
the silicone immersion oil. All of this crap, except for the xylocaine, is
to enable me to do a melting point test on the smack, to see if it's
within the literature values. I flame-sealed a pipette at one end, I have
to drop a chunk of the stuff down there so it's thermally coupled to the
pipette, then heat the oil and watch the thermometer when the stuff melts.
I got an email from Leelz, which I laughed at very hard, about how she's
getting paid stupid amounts of money to shit in people's mouths in
Montreal. To the right people shit really is worth something, it appears.
Certain Canadians are gonna get bad breath.
I retreated to my room at night again, declining by SMS two offers of a
shag, from two people who, when I told them I was a dribbling snot monster
from outer space, separately claimed already to have had the 'flu already.
I'd go talk to my olds, except they are both in front of sustained,
electronic inanity of the blaring TV (they're a bit deaf) which they
evidently find preferable to my conversation, and mum smokes anyway - I'd
sit in front of the fire 'cept the updraught sucks her putrid fag smoke
towards me when I do. They think this is all perfectly reasonable. Do they
think Ray fucking Martin's gonna tell 'em the significant issues of their
day, like that their son's finally tooled up to kill himself? Maybe they
do. They're used to coming home and selling their eyeballs to Young and
Rubicam.
"Hey Ray - get your haaand off it."
-TISM (Been Caught Wanking) from the www.tism.wanker.com album (Shock Records)
"You don't drink, you don't smoke, you don't go to the football, you don't
go to the races, you don't live in a real world. This isn't life
or death, this is more important - this is what beer you're gonna drink."
-advertising mogul John Singleton, quoted in "Boring Fart"
Mr Floppy - from the "Unbearable Lightness of Being a Dickhead" album
(ZPD001 - Mushroom Distribution Services 9 398601 020628 )
I remember the foaming pandemonium which gripped them both when dad
accidentally brushed the hidden, and unbeknownst, ON/OFF switch while
opening the adjacent window. They bought ANOTHER TV and couldn't get that
to work either. Dad was very fucking grumpy when I refused to set the new
one up on the basis that I believed that the old one was not broken. These
otherwise normal citizens are classically conditioned tube addicts. Maybe
your family has one. Why it shits me now is these dudes and millions like
them think they have a lifespan to waste, collectively years of their
lives, not even communicating, just sucking noise, adverts, adverts
dressed up as news, stuff which isn't news (just history repeating itself)
and various kinds of misinformation. Why for fuck's sake does fashion week
make it to air and contaminate my rants by provoking me to complain about
its mind-smashing banality? I mean, it'd be interesting to watch if the
emaciated waifs had to oh, I dunno, run from a guard dog instead of
dysplastically flouncing down the runway with a gaunt look of grim angst
on their mugs.
"Who'd rather watch someone's life on TV than participate in their own."
-Jello Biafra, NoMeansNo, Bill's Diary, (from The Sky Is Falling and I
Want My Mommy!) - Alternative Tentacles records.
Well. That cuts you guys out of the clue loop, I reckon. You can find out
about my death on the fucking telly, where you find out about everything
else important enough to make it to a corporate-owned PAL raster.
I drank yet another bottle of BaSO4 for a CT scan I'm undergoing tomorrow.
I am tired of these things, mainly of the needles to inject the contrast
medium, but I think there could be worse experiences to undergo in order
to find out what else my disease is doing.
Cancer treatment is a stop/go journey. Find something wrong, chop it
out. Wait. Find something else wrong. Try and find someone who'll chop it
out. Chop it out. Wait until, inevitably, something else goes wrong. Can't
chop it out this time. Cry a lot. Get dead. Zzzzz. My story has been
played out in a million other abdomens and I've never heard about them.
Maybe it's like mine.
"Violence. Boredom. Violence. Boredom."
- Dave Grainey's Country Idyll - Jock Cheese (Platter)
I'm using gramofile to rip Jock Cheese Platter for Phludde. It was the
first album I listened to after the diagnosis. I like this track 'cos it's
so ... failed escapist. It's about the tacit observation that you can run
wherever you like, ditch yer city job, sell yer house if you have one,
fuck off down the coast or wherever, in search of some freedom you might
imagine to be there, somewhere, any-elsewhere, and ... you'll discover
that life still has sucky aspects wherever you go, and certain people will
still bash the piss out of you in the carpark regardless of what place
you've chosen to hide from the last place you chose to live. I'm not sure
what they're getting at, but it's probably that one bring's one's
suckiness with one wherever one goes.
It occurs to me that I might well chicken out of shooting the smack if
anyone I like is there on the night. Zen Flesh points out, correctly, how
painfully sweet things are when you're about to lose them all. I am
sometimes taunted by the thought that I somehow fucked up my life, and
it'd be not entirely unexpected to me if my last memory was something
like, "this fuckin' syringe is blocked", then I wake up in a cell or a
hospital someplace, on account of having fucked up my death too.
----------
The radiographer up at South Hurstville is my height, 100 kgs of processed
beef, and I have come to know him moderately well of late - he smiled at
me as I showed up this morning. I was feeling hungry, fluey and generally
rotten. He moves with the non-alacrity which comes from living in a chunk
of meat which takes a bit more time to accelerate than my rather more
gracile chassis.
"Not again." He said. "Yeah. Not again." I said wringing a half-cocked
smile out of the side of my face. He passed me another bottle of BaSO4 and
said, you know the drill. I gulped it down and waited for 20 minutes while
it dispersed itself in my small intestine. I ditched my clothes, got into
a disposable gown, and climbed on. He got the canula in beautifully the
first time (I suggested 21 gague, left arm). Full of that whooshy
iopamidol, I was fed into the eye of that inane beige cowling which is
meant to protect me from any understanding of how the whirling electrical
eyes within it function, and from guessing what demographic of people tend
to lie here to be subjected to their electromagnetic gaze.
I went out, ate an apple and had some coffee (and read B magazine, gotta
know what they're pretending to think) and scored a massively overpriced
copy of Felt Mountain at inSanity while the radiographers developed the
CTs.
I came back and picked up the envelope. Private and confidential, it said,
but it's my disease, I'm gonna read about it, thanks.
There's more.
Of course.
Now, aside from Bill, there are a bunch of enlarged (see also, stuffed
with rogue renal cells) right-side lymph nodes, and a new mass, in back of
my inferior vena cava, squishing it.
I don't have to be paranoid any more, now I know why my back hurts and why
it goes hurt, hurt, hurt with every heartbeat in particular positions.
Check it out in the Grays Anatomy, the IVC is the fat central vein taking
blood out of my legs and kidneys ... ah, kidney, and stuff, and routing it
up to the right cardiac atrium, if memory serves me correctly. I fed this
out to Joss' mum:
---------- Forwarded message --------------------------------------------
Date: Sat, 8 May 2004 15:55:29 +1000 (EST)
From: predator@cat.org.au
To: Joss' mum,
Subject: But wait, there's more...
Hi Caz...
I climbed into the CT scanner today, and they scanned the chest and
abdomen. I thought something might be uh, interesting since they spent a
bit more time than usual scanning my lower body. This is because, as
Eisinger might have suspected, there's more involved lymph nodes, so they
scanned 'em again at higher resolution. Here's the chewy assessment:
--------------
Folio 889299-1 U/R No 59376
There is a mass lesion in the left supraclavicular region measuring 5.1 x
4.3 cm in diameter with inhomogeneous attenuation after IV contrast and
this has the appearances of a lymph node mass. Comparison is made with a
previous scan of 20/04/04 and this has not changed significantly in
appearence. There is no mediastinal lymphadenopathy and the lungs and
pleural cavities remain clear.
There are no signs of any pulmonary metastases.
In the abdomen the liver appears normal and there are no hepatic
metastases. There is a soft tissue mass lesion behind the IVC displacing
and compressing the IVC and there appears to be some large retrocaval
lymph nodes present probably due to metastatic disease. This is best
appreciated on images 63 to 72 on page 4 and in the last enlarged
film. The left nephrectomy is noted. The right kidney function promptly
after intravenous injection is normal. The pancreas and spleen are
unremarkable and there was no further abnormality demonstrated.
CONCLUSION Enlarged lymph nodes in left supraclavicular fossa and right
retrocaval region.
Dr E Bass
---------
The fun doesn't stop, does it? I'll wave this under Poole's nose on Tues.
Oh, yeah. On Se, my Martindales 30th suggests that the absolute max one
should be taking of selenomethionine or selenocysteine is 465 mikes daily
and they (whoever wrote the particular report) also reckon there was no
really hard evidence to suggest the stuff was really of any benefit for
cancer or cardiovascular disease; The jar I buy containing it suggests
more than 100 mikes/day is toxic. I figure it's no good taking the stuff
at oncostatic levels if that will bugger up other things (Martindales
refers to a report suggesting Se homeostasis might be destabilised in the
presence of large [Se]. So 100 mikes it shall be. Oral Se doesn't appear
to have slowed down the appearance of other lymph mets though again these
might have been cryptics, already doomed before we tossed the kidney.
-----------------
I viewed this black news in the quiet, solitary gloom of the subfloor
carpark at 2 Ormonde Pde. All I could manage to say was "Ohhhh, poo" as I
breathed out and let my eyelids fall gently down as if they'd somehow
repel the message bouncing off the page.
Influenza's looking positively laughable, enjoyable, desirable by
comparison but I'm only saying this 'cos I think I'm getting over the
'flu... it's usually something straightforwardly overcome, but has
historically killed tens of millions.
Right about now, Mr Floppy says it pretty well:
---------------------------
I feel this is the lot which I accept and which will not change.
I feel exhausted.
If I had not seen other lunatics close up, I should not have been able to
free myself from dwelling on it constantly.
I feel exhausted.
I generally try to be very cheerful.
My life is all so threatened at the very root.
I feel exhausted.
I know well that healing comes if one is brave, from within; through
profound resignation to suffering and death; through the surrender of your
own will, and of your self-love.
I feel exhausted.
I generally try to be very cheerful.
I see no happy future at all.
I feel exhausted.
I see no happy future at all.
I feel exhausted.
I see no happy future at all.
I feel exhausted.
I see no happy future at all.
Mr Floppy - "Sunflowers"
- from the "Unbearable Lightness of Being a Dickhead" album
(ZPD001 - Mushroom Distribution Services 9 398601 020628 )
It's about the most depressing bit of music I've ever heard. I think, on
the whole, the album achieved a balance nevertheless, given their
screamingly funny speed-metal version of Wuthering Heights.
------------------------------
I came home via the junkpile and found my spoke key, a litre of rotary
vacuum pump silicone oil, a couple of CDs I wanted to listen to, a bunsen
burner, a cylinder of propane, an old Telectronics defibrillator/pacemaker
I had intended to cut open for years, and a big boro frit funnel. Ho-kay,
now we find out if the angel of death can be relied upon. Melting point
tests rely on the change of reflectivity of materials when they
crystallise. You can see the powder turn to a clear liquid.
DIY melting point test.
1) flame-seal the end of the pipette in an oxidising flame.
2) drop test material into open end of the pipette, flick until a few
mm depth of test material is compacted in sealed end of pipette.
3) Clamp quartz crucible in retort stand. Half-fill with nonflammable
clear oil with high boiling temperature. Preheat oil
4) Clamp 340 degree thermometer and test pipette with ends adjacent under
oil surface.
5) add a contrasting material behind the test material to clearly
visualise changes in state.
6) heat crucible. Observe temperature reading as material
starts to melt and completes melting, and also as material commences
and completes recrystallisation on removal of heat source. Repeat until
results stabilise.
Silicone oil is used in high-vacuum apparatus precisely because it's hard
to boil it, gases don't dissolve well in it so it doesn't outgas much
under heating or reduced pressure, nor does it chemically break down into
a gas when you heat it up a lot - and it absolutely refuses to catch fire.
The defib, even though it was oh, twenty years old, was beautifully
engineered. It spewed glaring white sparks when I cut through it with the
diamond disc, which makes me think its casing was titanium, not stainless
steel (ferrous metals have yellowish or red sparks). All the ICs were
shielded in gold, the SMD resistors all notched down to precise
tolerances. I still haven't figured out the electrochemistry of the
batteries... if indeed that's what they are. They're absolutely flat.
There's one thing in there with 2.5V still on it. Also a bunch of
Beryllium Oxide SCRs, sealed in stainless steel cases... fascinating place
to hide toxic waste - within the thoraxes of cardiac patients. This must
be why it's dodgy to put pacemakers into crematoria.
I told mum the results of the CT. She lit up a smoke and said oh shit. She
wept a little bit and said, in the past tense, we didn't have you for
long, did we. She's waking up. Later I showed her the little rock of opiod
agonist and the rig with which I was going to verify the material's
purity. I don't think she understands what the test tells me. I'd identify
the stuff much better with a time-of-flight mass spec but I'd go to gaol
for bringing in such a sample to be tested.
---------------------
I staggered off to the Mekanarchy gig. From the roof beams hung a cool
spider sculpture with a gas-axed four-stroke four cylinder engine camshaft
controlling the legs which moved around, spider-like under the influence
of a half-horsepower motor (ever seen what half a horse looks like?).
Wicked costumes. More people I havent seen for ages who seem incapable of
understanding that when I die I am dead, and I am tired of hearing waffly
crap about how my energy or spirit or some such bollocks is gonna remain.
Think about how much data my personality needs to encode it up there on my
neocortex, and then how much bandwidth there is available to get it out. I
can probably name and remember large sections of thousands of songs,
millions of events that have made up my life, rah rah. I mean, I wrote
this much rant in six months and it took up about half a megabyte, right?
It's like my CV was, a mere slice of what I did and where I was and what I
was thinking and feeling for my whole life. All those memories, doomed to
rot in the great /dev/null of thermodynamics.
I popped over to another party later, at Cremmo's new rental accom, and
after breathing in more 2ndhand tobacco smoke just slept on a mattress
Emily laid out for me. I couldn't get comfortable, my back throbbed and
Cremmo's cat still insists on sitting on my head and purring.
I woke, had breakfast at Why, came home, lay in the bath for a while. Got
out, dressed a bit, answered some email, went back to bed. Low-interest
sunday, another lost weekend, as Stan Ridgeway might have called it. I
finally relented to the SMS's and went over to say hi to the South African,
which is to say, shagged on the couch and we both subsequently collapsed
as a consequence. We both laughed pretty hard when, in that sort of
stunned, panting, post-coital silence ya get after a good shaggin' I
managed to mumble "Happy mother's day." Her kids are in their twenties. We
chatted long into the night. I wonder when my back met is gonna do
something like fuck up my ability to walk, or shag, or take a piss when I
want to. When will it invade that precious shielded data pipe in my
vertebrae, the roaring vasculature nestled against it, my other kidney, or
something else important, and fuck up my days permanently.
I fed this off to Joss:
------------
From predator@cat.org.au Mon May 10 16:00:41 2004
Date: Mon, 10 May 2004 13:33:18 +1000 (EST)
From: predator@cat.org.au
To: shonky@cat.org.au
Subject: Time, gentlemen.
Hi dude.
Well, I climbed in the CT scanner on saturday and found out why my back
hurts. Yet another neoplasm, close to the original scene of the crime.
It's putting pressure on my inferior vena cava which is the big pipe which
takes used blood from my legs and a few other things and routes it up to
my heart. It goes ow every time my heart beats and I've run out of ways to
get posturally comfortable so I'm starting to throw painkillers down my
neck. There's additional right retrocaval lymph nodes involved now, too.
I'd love 'em to chop this shit out. Dad's take is that in his clinical
experience chopping these things out "doesn't alter outcomes" as he put it
so they'll probably go the nuclear weapons option and blast it with some
or other species of radiation. Which the literature tells me doesn't alter
outcomes much either. Ah, the literature.... said I'd likely be showing up
with cryptic mets like these within the year after the kidney was
flung. Sure enough, I have.
Goldfrapp's Felt Mountain has nine tracks on it, cost thirty bucks and is
not as good as Black Cherry I think, much darker. THough I've gotta give
it a few more listens.
Bill hasn't changed. I see a bloke tomorrow who will decide if he can be
fucked trying to chop it out.
I'm not generally inclined to jerk people's schedules around to suit me,
though I'm very conscious that my remaining time's sorta shortening quite
rapidly. I'm elapsing. I'm entering that window where nothing will be fun
any more, 'cos I'll be sick as a dog from treatment, if I decide to have a
go, and sick as a dog from disease if I decide not to. So if you're still
inclined to, you should catch me nowish.
I miss ya and love ya and it sucks not being near you.
x x
available for a limited time only
------------------------
I miss her, and it's odd, her default state for most of our relationship
has been that she's miles away and I'm cool with it but I'd be much, much
cooler about her requirements for prolonged periods of solitude if they
were just smaller slices of my lifespan than they are now. What's a few
years out of thirty years of remaining lifespan? Fuck all, compared to a
month out of, for example's sake, six. These days I don't even have any
guarantee of a handful of months before something critical gets invaded
and I am suddenly dead. Patience, patience, one part of me says...
patience be fucked, says another. I feel like such a needy, pleading twonk
asking her to come back to Sydney while I still have a body which isn't a
total fuckup to live in, it's an infringement on my "don't bug joss" rule,
but I feel like I know her less than I used to.
I go see the head and neck dude tomorrow morning.
-
Tues, May 11th.
I did. He looked at my neck, looked at my scan, and said he understood it
was a good idea trying to get it all out, but couldn't figure out how far
down into my chest it had gone so I'd have to yet get another scan.
He asked who was my GP. I mentioned I gave Paul DeSousa the arse 'cos he
wouldn't speak molecular biology to me. Prof Poole mentioned this was
because Paul was not a molecular biologist. Yeah, he's a knife merchant, I
said. If he doesn't know the mol bio, he doesn't know the disease. Saying
this sort of stuff to people who are, more or less, precision butchers, is
not gonna make me popular with their club of blade-toting anatomy
modifiers, meat sculptors and so forth, upon whom I nevertheless depend
for accurate expulsion of pieces of myself I don't like. But it's the
truth. Which is why they don't like it. Fuck it. I don't like it either.
I showed up for the scan later that afternoon and the CT scanner was out
of commission (they couldn't reboot it, apparently). So I rode home,
getting stung in the finger by a bee en-route, after it flew into the gap
between my helmet and my forehead and I tried to wiggle it out. It took a
certain kind of control to not cause a road accident with the little
insect angrily thrashing around an inch from my eye. I don't begrudge the
bee either, I did smack it in the face at 70km/h with a motorcyclist's
forehead after all.
Finger throbbing, I checked out the gear.
First things first, shove it under a UV light. No glow... good, some
shithead hasn't cut it with washing powder for a whiter-than-white
appearance. Next, bash off a bit of powder and drop it into a flame-sealed
pipette. I immersed the pipette and the thermometer in the oil, and
heated the crucible slowly with a bunsen flame. The literature values for
the melting point of diacetylmorphine and its hydrochloride are a fuck of
a lot higher than the roughly 99 degrees this stuff melted at (and it
didn't crystallise on cooling either, suggesting it had been chemically
changed by the heating). The solubility was weird, it wouldn't dissolve in
glacial acetic or naphtha, and only dissolved slowly and incompletely in
excess distilled ethanol. I reckon it's either a tropane or maybe
fentanyl, or a mixture of stuff, but sure as shit isn't straight heroin.
Part of whatever it is crystallises out as the ethanol evaporates, and the
solvent becomes saturated with some-or-other gunk which then nucleates and
grows crystals, but they're the wrong shape, looking very like oh, needles
of sulfonamide or something else with acicular crystal habit. Grrrr.
This is bloody disappointing, my easy exit isn't there, on-tap like I
wanted it to be, so I'm still at the mercy of this capricious goddamned
disease and the specialists who hesitate to chop things out. Yeah yeah
yeah I know surgery isn't gonna alter the final result of this disease but
it will fucking alter how I get there and how soon. I wanna ask
oncologists, so doctor, if this was in your neck, would you chop it out?
My passport expired. I'm sort of glad in a way. Natch, a few days after,
XML SMS'd me asking if I wanted to go to Aukland with her. I never went to
NZ. Used to be ya didn't need to get a passport to go to NZ... you do
now... consequence of the Mor_on Terror. I'd be afraid to go over there
now, I'd get off the plane and this creeping doom'd act up somehow so I
could be fucked up in a hospital in NZ for a change.
I got an SMS from Dougo in Melbourne. Melbourne Clan dude Pagan finally
died last thursday. Cancer got him too, though not what I have.
Dark. Want sleep. Back hurts. Painkillers. Wait for painkillers to kick
in. Sleep. Wake up and immediately notice the painkillers have worn off.
Take more painkillers. I am very fucking lucky to live on a part of the
planet where the US doesn't bomb our pharmaceutical factories. If I wanted
pain relief in the Sudan, I'd be fucked.
Our glorious premier Nob Carr has decided not to legalise growing dope for
pain control if yer a cancer/HIV/MS/otherwise fucked up pain freak. For
the time being, paracetamol's doing me well. I have some codiene lined up
someplace. And some barbiturates... surprising what some microbes like to
grow in. If I need thebaine I can start chewing poppy seeds but that's a
lot of work and ungrateful to the teeth.
Being subjected to CT's, which still amaze me for the amazing tech and
physics they have in them, bores me now. Get 'em over with. This must be
the forth time we've x-rayed my neck in six months. I asked Goldstein to
chop Bill the fuckin' met out, in fuckin' January. I'd dyke it out myself
with a bread knife (oh, they're illegal these days, I hear) in the waiting
room at the emergency wing of the hospital if I didn't think I'd die of
blood loss while they waited to attend the subsequent gash. I don't think
the Prof appreciated my email to him in which I laid it all down that
although immunology was the way to get out of this disease alive, his
proposed immunostimulatory treatments are something of a false hope, I
mean, fuck, we're dealing with cells already selected for their
immunoevasive talents, aren't we, if we weren't then I wouldn't be full of
the little bastards, they'da been phagocytosed or apoptosed or wrapped up
in a fibrotic cocoon or something already by now. I wonder if I'm the
first patient he's had who's had the temerity, or foolishness, to point
this out to him. Trust your mechanic? Oh, come on. Go get yer Merck index
and look up some of the drugs people use on cancer patients.
Cisplatin..."This substance may be reasonably anticipated to be a
carcinogen."... doxorubicin... "This substance may be reasonably
anticipated to be a carcinogen."... cyclophosphamide.... this material is
a known carcinogen... would ya believe it? In my professional opinion as
a biochemist it does rather strike me as fundamentally fucking stupid to
shoot up cancer patients with things that cause cancer. Whichever dweeb
thought that up?
After years of dreaming about doing it, and getting my modem knocked off
the line by mum inquisitively picking up the reciever, I rigged up
something to drop the carrier on the excessively (you know, several hours,
very low baud, highly redundant content) long phone calls mum gets into
(and complains she can't get out of), and it worked like a charm -
complete nobrainer - an RJ11 socket with its pins all bridged. I figure if
they're talking about something really important they'll call back. This
means I can actually make those brief, important calls to book
appointments with doctors who don't have fucking emails, when my
wankerfone's out of credit, and then the line's free afterwards.
Yeehar, wednesday. What the fuck did I do on Wednesday? Oh, I dunno
actually. I know I popped in at the glassblowers and asked 'em if they
wanted my Schott and Duran quickfit borosilicate rigs back, since the
value of the beautiful stuff'd be lost on other people, got my tests back
and I'm -ve for hiv, trep. pallidum, cocc. rickettsia, and hepB, of
fucking course. Chatted for a while to Fee and Jase again.... I wonder if
they're thinking I'm satan, sent to tempt them away from their christian
ethics, but they're asking pretty good questions actually. I looked out
the window at the last time at the big old figs in the Domain, before some
fuckhead chops them down. I spent some time thinking about how to build a
cheap rack-mount poota out of a mobo, PSU and a dead 1U hub chassis, and
also some time attempting a final recrystallisation of the dodgy smack,
which separated out into two fractions with different crystal habits and
one fraction which wouldn't dissolve in hot ethanol at all. Every few
seconds on Wednesday my tumors continued on their inexorable work
schedule, sucking resources out of their environment, popping out new
ones, like some kind of outta-control property developers.
Stupid little fuckers, they'd collectively weigh about as much as the pile
of neocortical cells with which I think about them, now, and yet I still
know so little about them, their particular molecular nuances. It's coming
down to brain versus blob and I'm feeling distinctly stupid by comparison.
If you could just walk up to somewhere, get some cells sucked out of ya
and have their metabolic profile extracted, so you knew what they were
doing, what they depended on for their survival, that'd really fuckin'
rock. Well, ya can, actually. Affymetrix chips could tell you what RNA
they make, which is a pretty good indicator of what genes they're
expressing and what metabolic processes they're running. I dunno anyone
who does this sort of profiling. Then... even if we had that, the
question'd be, how to hit these bastards in such a way that doesn't smash
all of the rest of me? Everything they do is stuff my other cells do too.
I wonder, in the aftermath of my death, what the murmered cliches will be?
`he died after a long struggle with cancer', `he passed away'; that
asshole God'll probably get a lot of mention too - `he went to God', or
some such hackneyed shit that seems to get murmered at all the funerals
I've ever attended, which isn't many. Someone'll correctly conclude Pred
died 'cos he didn't _outsmart_ his disease. I don't draw any comfort from
the idea that much bigger, better brains than mine have faced and failed
against this pathology.
Maybe how he died was, he let it kill him 'cos he couldn't be fucked
hanging around any more, which is in some ways actually a bit closer to
the truth than I'm really comfortable with telling. I'm not exactly doing
anything significant with my life now. Stuff's ever so slowly, ever so
surely, going grey. It's not a `long struggle with cancer' either, it's
not like some sort of sustained armwrestle on an even table under good
lighting where you can see what's happening straight away. It's more like
a hoarde of mozzies sucking you out from the inside, you can slap a few of
them, burn yerself trying to fry 'em all on the bug zapper, poison yerself
with mozzie spray, and eventually, all that's left is the mozzies, which
all die 'cos they've run out of stuff to suck on. Bzzzzzzzzzzzzt.
On wednesday night I went over to Nomes' place and played with parachutes
and read about skydiving accidents and how people spot 'em before they're
gonna happen, and ate some yummie pork chops and drank some odd
Czechoslovakian root'n'bark liquor which smelled like Angostura bitters...
once we were bit pissed we discovered that it was very funny when the
following line from Agent Smith in The Matrix...
"Have you ever stood, stared at it, marvelled in its beauty, its genius?
Billions of people just living out their lives... oblivious. Did you know
that the first matrix was designed to be a perfect human world, where
none suffered, where everyone would be happy. It was a disaster, no-one
would accept the program, entire crops were lost. Some believed that we
lacked the programming language to discribe your perfect world but I
believe that as a species, human beings define their reality through
misery and suffering - the perfect world was a dream your primitive
cerebrums kept trying to wake up from. Which is why the matrix was
redesigned to this - the peak of your civilisation. When I say your
civilisation, when we started doing your thinking for you it really
became _our_ civilisation which is, of course, what this is all about.
Evolution."
...is delivered in various other accents than the voice of Hugo Weaving.
Like, a seth effrican accent, or a new zealand accent, or the squirrel
from Rocky and Bullwinkle, or the Prime Miniature - the latter is
especially a scream.
Thurs morning I woke up and went to Randwick to chat to the chick who it
turns out I correctly rememebered was responsible for the microbial
culture collection. I told her the sitch, asked about getting some of the
bugs (dead, if they had any problems with supplying live bugs), and she
mentioned they'd probably say no. That I could isolate them from the
environment doesn't matter, it's that they're human pathogens, blah blah
blah, we have to conform to strict standards and we get whackos asking for
stuff occasionally, rah rah (I had to laugh, I am a whacko but I'm very
earnestly intentioned about why I want these specific bugs, S.marcescens
and Strep pyrogenes.) I feel sometimes like I'm dying of bureaucracy.
Got another load of ascorbate shoved up my arm. I don't feel like it's
doing me any good, but that's not 'cos it feels bad or anything, it feels
like nothing's happening, and I only know if it's having an effect from
what shows up on scans later on.
I finally dropped in the new Cat server at Turella, picked up XML and went
around to Smokering's and watched a lot of DVD episodes of the
Thunderbirds. Man, I remember some of that stuff from my childhood. Wow.
Gerry Anderson did a fucking good job on that stuff... the *details* on
everything were really well done. And now, I understand why Alan's always
grumpy, though I didn't when I was watching this stuff 24 years ago early
on saturday mornings... Tintin's not shagging him and he's a
hormone-sodden little adolescent marionette root rat (we looked closely
for a frontally mounted string for his dick to confirm this suspicion, but
didn't spot one). We stopped watching this stuff at about 2am and all went
to sleep in Smokering's room, he and XML on his mattress and m'self on a
futon he put on the floor. My back hurt.
So we lay there, Thunderbird tunes stuck in our heads, chatting about how
acetic anhydride is used to prepare heroin from morphine (and fuck
me I remembered the structure of acetic anhydride, too:
Me-C=O O=C-Me
\ /
O
... it's a weirdo di-keto ether thing)
We stopped mumbling at about three am and dozed off.
We all woke up, Smokering muttering to me something about how to implement
packet counting on two different subnets on Gnu/Linux firewalls, got into
his clothes and got out his .303 and a load of ammo and toddled off to the
shootin' range with XML. I floated over to Balmain, late, and got
amazingly stoned with Jude, which as I warned 'em would make me very
giggly, and Soph took fotos of me in this dazed state of blissed out
giggledom. We waddled down to Elko park and ate food and waddled back and
I kinda remember falling asleep upright in a chair on Joss' back balcony
with the sun shining on the left side of my face. I got out of the chair
somehow and slept blissfully as the sun set, and woke up to an empty house
at about eight so I rode around to Turella, had some curry and went to bed
with Cookie. I didn't go to sleep though - on this night the paracetamol
wasn't cuttin' it. Nor did the ibuprofen she happened to have. So I
thrashed around a lot and went off to a light sleep, punctuated with
little back throbs. It's a nuisance when I shag now too, I can't arch my
spine all the way backwards without something going sprong and being
painful. Fuckin' cancer.
We staggered out into another glaring sunday, had food up the 'Cinque, and
walked down to the Alpha House sketch club, where Marg proposed a porno
party on the 18th of June. I think I will just sit around naked if I am
well enough to attend.
Fuel's hit a dollar again.
-----------
May 17th. 12:15am.
Ever wanted to strangle your mother? My mum told me this evening, stubbing
out the remains of her last smoke of the day before retiring to bed to
cough it up in her sleep, that she believes that the idea that passive
smoking gives people cancer is a load of gumf.
I asked her, where do you think it goes after it comes out of your lungs
and out of your fag? She said it disappears. No, I told her, it goes on
the curtains, the walls, the cieling, the bedclothes. The dog stinks of
it. My hair. My skin. My lungs. Dad's lungs. Then she dropped her
scientific summary of tobacco combustion chemistry, aerosol physics,
cancer epidemiology, and refusal to take any responsibility for her
behaviour or its consequences, on me, supremely confident that she was
correct, in the way that judges and ministers of religion are when they
hand down their illuminary insights. That passive smoking gives people
cancer is a load of gumf.
[Your ignorance and stupidity may kill others]
For about a second I had this flash of homicidal rage, I felt it ripple
across me, right down to my toes. I believe that tearing off your
obviously empty head won't hurt you, either. She didn't spot it. I said
nothing. I just got up and left the room, with her, her smouldering smoke,
and the dog on the floor.
Holy, holy, holy, shit. What am I turning into? Or have I have just seen
some sort of monster that has always lurked within, waiting to rip out of
the veneer I wrap it in, and... you know, really thoroughly, violently,
gratuitiously fucking atomise somebody, tear their arm off and club them
to death with it?
"I'm addicted to it, son."
"You've weaned yourself off harder stuff than that, though, haven't you,
like the pentobarbitol you used to get into?"
She is silent.
These days I pull cones 'cos it doesn't fucking matter if I get lung
cancer (as happens, I should about now get renal cancer nodes in my lungs
from the shit leaking out of my lymph system). I choose to smoke other
people's weed when they are kind enough to offer it, because it eases my
pain, makes me giggle. I do it with other people who are doing the same,
for whatever reason they're doing it. I don't do it to fuck up other
people's bodies.
--------
Monday. May 18.
Anecdotes:
1) Go around to Frank's. He plays the violin he just finished constructing
and it sounds pretty fuckin good, though this might just be his virtuoso
playing. I built a new electrode for his Jacobs Ladder ozone generator,
with which he ages wood years in a matter of weeks.
2) MBF rang me up asking permission to use my name in an advertising
campaign about why people come back to MBF. I told them this would be
unethical for two reasons. First _they_ fucked up a reciept of payment in
Nov 2002 which meant my account elapsed. Second... I'm dying and MBF
will not fix this no matter what level of cover I have. It would be sort
of silly for a man terminally cankered to go on telly and blab about why
he went back to the big nasty health care corporation. Wouldn't it?
I feel better now.
3) Go look at google.com for the keyphrase
uniformly untreatable disease
and guess what comes up, complete with instructions on a couple of people
who had what I have, and managed to survive with massive exposure to
ascorbate and a few other things.
Bill, by the way, is huge. Following the fascia Bill has extended down to
about the level of the top of my sternum, and upwards, to the point of
being about level with the top of my left trapezius muscle. You can see
Bill attempting to erupt out of my neck, stretching the thin covering of
skin above him. He feels turgid and botryoidal to the touch. The little
superficial veins in his immediate vicinity are prominent. I can't quite
get my thumb under it; I'd estimate there's about 100 grams of bill now.
A perhaps undocumented vampiric occupational hazard would be to suck on my
sinistral nape in its present state of oncological profusion, thereby
efficiently giving the vampire an heterologous renal metastatic disease
reducing its lifespan rather significantly, no?
Odd stuff... my left leg went to sleep for no obvious reason, then woke
up. I feel odd stretchy feelings in my right inner thigh. Oh, what the
fuck is going on?!
I got fuck all sleep last night, the paracetamol isn't cutting it for pain
relief. I woke up and cried in the shower as the warm water eased it
somewhat and the realisation dawned that all my mornings might be like
this one. Or worse. My scrote hurts, my right ilium hurts, the right
side of my lower back hurts, some of my right leg hurts in certain
postures. It's all referred pain I expect, from the retrocaval stuff.
Prof Poole reckons yeah, they can chop it out, but it's risky to the lymph
drainage, to the 10th cranial nerve (runs half my larynx) and some of the
nervous supply to the left arm. May 31st, Bill gets the chop. I think I
might try and get him in a jar. So I can torture him in the microwave on
maximum nuke setting for oh, 300 years or so.
XML and I spent a lot of time hugging. I went round Toad Hall and gave
Jude a 6Gb harddisk to replace the glitchy one he used to have. Joss
showed up, and I think she's pretty frayed, her war of attrition with
Azza's gradually taking its toll.
I went back to River st and slept, 'cos that's where the codiene is. Well,
slept until it wore off then thrashed around, swearing, until I got
another one and slept again and woke up in the middle of wednesday. Joss's
perhaps premature comment of six months ago, that I feel tired, has now
come true. I do. Full of food I still feel lethargic, I exercised the dog
today with more of a controlled forward stagger than a walk. I get random
little episodes of tearfullness - microweeps - and faint zaps of nausea.
Sitting down to write this stuff hurts now so I'm exercising greater
brevity, you'll notice (with a sigh of relief, I suspect).
May 20
Eisinger rang up...the PET dudes won't scan me, I apparently am not sick
enough to meet the criteria under which they will scan me, which makes me
think they don't get a whole lot of customers. I don't think this matters
especially. Looking for additional cryptic mets will not really tell me
anything. It's time to treat them. Chopping them out where we can,
screwing with their biochemistry where we can't.
I ate dinner with Deb again and she's finally, after ten years, revealed
some stuff I always wondered about. I am glad for her.
My skydiving trip on Saturday was cancelled.
Brushing my hair this morning wore me out. I breathe hard sometimes in
response to doing no additional exercise. I somehow managed to spend some
of the day with Joss, going to bookshops, and the rockpools at Bondi, and
I fixed a CD player of hers which had about 7 years of dust on the lens.
It wore me out. I want to ask her to just hug me for hours and not let
go. I think, and she sez, she's on the mend. Going to Canberra.
Everything hurts. It hurts when I breathe in hard. My back hurts.
Swallowing hurts 'cos Bill's pressed against my oesophageal wall. This
isn't funny at all. I am too tired to do just about everything. It's
fucking with my metabolism now, fuckin' cancer, if it stays this way I'll
be sleep-deprived, caved-in, flattened, too tired and pain-aversive to
shag; so now I know. Joss and I had our final ever shag on the carpet at
Autana six weeks ago and I didn't even get off.
Eventually I'll be too tired to drive, to feed myself, wash, oh, fuck,
fuck this sucks. I'd cry but I'm too tired to do that too. The creeping
fatigue has commenced. This is what kills most cancer patients...
cachexia, malnutrition.
I'm arranging for some ascorbate/alphalipoic and glutathione to come up
from Melbourne. Dad's acquiring some drip bags, I've screwed an eyehook to
my bedpost. He hasnt lost his sense of humour ... mum asked him if he'd do
me a favour and he asked, whats he want, some suppositories?
Oh shit man. Funny how one can do as much thinking about this as one likes
in advance of it happening, but it's the actual physical nausea, pain,
with no respite, which really nails in the realisation that you're really,
really sick. It's coming for me. The sky is falling.
May 21.
4am.
Everything hurts when the painkillers wear off and I wake up at 4am and
thrash around for a few hours. The other smack arrived, so I have to assay
it, given I was burnt last time. I got in a hot bath at 6am and slept in
it until about 8, and was hearing this fweep, fweep, fweep, fweep noise in
my left ear, which is the sound of my carotid artery being deformed and
the blood turbulently flowing through it, oooh shit. I was going out of my
mind by 9am, weeping uncontrollably, unable to get anything to shut up the
pain in my right 'nad and back. So mum said she'd gimme a moggie, to
sedate me. I SMS'd Carole. A few hours later, thank fuck, Joss came
around. I can't say how much of a relief this was. She and mum get on
allright, I think there aren't many people who can bum a fag off mum
within two hours of meeting them.
Fuck. This is such an effort, merely sitting at the keyboard. Maybe I'll
have to stop.
I'll go see Tism on July 9 if I live that long.
Saturday 22nd. All the tranq dad gave me last night got me about three
hours of sleep. I walked the dog at 5am and barely managed to stagger
home. I slept in the bath from 6-8am (the heat really masks the pain) but
then had to get out. The only way to stop my right testi hurting like hell
was to jump around. It's taking me down very fast.
Keith took me to Balmain, Caz shot me up with 30g of ascorbate and I strew
up a bit. They dropped me at RNS where the med students had a look and
said things like, difficult dissection, may have to cut the collarbone to
get at it. I got a cab home and felt like shit again all night. Cookie
visited, yay. I will miss her.
MOnday 24th. My birthday. I go to Edgecliffe to get more ascorbate shot up
me then to Randwick to scream at my oncologist. I can't walk straight. I
think I will have to end the log here since I am perpertually weak. I am
dying. Goodbye.
Broadcast message from root@pred:
Sending all processes the TERM signal.