Hi all!

I'm a great aunt again!  Little (and I do mean little) Brooklyn Grace was born to a weary but happy Mom (Deanna) and a happy Dad (Tim).  She's adorable from the photos I've seen and I can't wait to hold her.

Instead of posting today on my own blog, let me refer you to the guest blog I did on the Beyond Breast Cancer website, run by a delightful woman named Marie.

There's lots of interesting posts on her blog, so take some time to explore, if you've got the time to spare.  (Tim and Deanna are exempt...new parents and all.)

An op-ed in today's LA Times really got me going...so much so that I wrote a letter to the editor.  The op-ed, titled "When I'm really old, put me on that ice floe" by Ira Rosofsky is generally about the rationing of health care that happens "naturally" within our current system to folks who can't afford insurance or are underinsured.

He goes on to talk about Medicare as being the ice floe for elderly folks who account for 1/4 of all medical expenditures.  And then have the temerity to require nearly 30% of all Medicare expenditures for end of life care.  (Thoughtless bastards, these old folks.)

From there, he goes on to refererence an article about the relative cost/benefit equation of cetuximab (a chemo drug) for people with non-small cell lung cancers.  He notes that the average life extension for such patients is 1.2 months at a cost of $80,000.

"That means it would cost $800,000 to prolong the life of a patient for one year," he says.

Unfortunately, Rosofsky doesn't realize (or found it inconvenient) to address the definition of "average."  Some patients no doubt have much more benefit from the drug...others have none.  So his $800,000 for an extra year doesn't work.

More irritatingly, he trots out the cultural paradigm of what such life extension is like by saying, "...not to mention the pain and suffering and the reduced quality of life from a treatmehnt that marginally prolongs life."

As someone who has expensive chemo drugs every other week, I would like to point out to Mr. Rosofsky (and to all and sundry) that our cultural trope about cancer treatments being "hell" are not so for many, if not the majority, of people living with cancer.

I like my life on chemo quite well, thank you.  Don't be shoving me onto your ice floe.

In my neverending quest to finish up magazine articles I've started, I picked up a (few months) old Esquire this morning and completed reading an article started back when the magazine issue was new.  The article was called "Stories My Father Told Me" and it was written by Tyler Cabot.

Cabot explored several things in the course of the finely written article: his ambivalence about his father's chosen profession of defending large corporate clients as a litigator, his father's choice to represent one of the detainees at Guantanamo, and the ways in which our choices shape us.

At the end of the article was this elegant quote:

"There are inflection points in the life of a man, or in the life of a country.  That is, there are points beyond which things will never be the same.  Once you've taken responsibility for someone's life and freedom in a challenge to the authority of your own government, torts and contracts and product liability might lose a bit of their urgency.  Once a man has changed, it can be hard to reconcile his old self with the new.  Once a country has changed, it can be unrecognizable to those who thought they new it best."

In a few short sentences, Cabot captured exactly what I was feeling during much of the Bush administration's pursuit of war in Iraq, in its detaining without counsel, charges, trial dates or judicial oversight of "enemy combatants," in the way the "war against terror" seemed to trump any niceties like constitutional rights or obligations under the Geneva convention.

it may seem like the time for reading this article is past.  Bush is out of office, Guantanamo is slated to be shut down, the Obama administration is figuring out how to best prosecute the detainees that warrant prosecution out of the hash they were handed. 

But I found the article timely for two reasons:

1.  It reaffirmed why I voted for Obama instead of McCain (and why I never voted for Bush).  --and here's where Steve can begin shouting-- I believe that there are some lines that Obama will not cross.  That transparency is truly his goal and that he's young enough at this game not to compromise our core principles for consolidation of power and the illusion of security.  I didn't recognize our country under Bush.  I'm starting to recognize it now.

2.  As someone who has profoundly changed due to my life being turned inside out/upside down within the space of a few days--I find that there was a great deal of resonance for me in the idea of inflection points.  There are changes that shift us to our core.  Where some things are just not interesting anymore (zombie movies in my case) and others become more profoundly important (family, friends, a day in the sun, birds, butterflies...I could go on.)

Bravo to Tyler Cabot for writing the article and to his father for representing the "unrepresentable" pariah--an enemy combatant.

Mom #1 (aka Charlene, Charmom, Chuckie in days of old) forwarded me an article about the outsourcing of copy editing and page layout from various newspapers around the globe (including the Orange County Register's stable of local publications) to a group in India.

Which triggered the Sunday Question:

How do you view the current state of flux and reconfiguration of our nation's print media?  Is it a good thing, and if so, why?  Or will it be the dumbing down (even futher) of our news sources and hence our society?

There are piles of papers, magazines and books in my office.  No matter.

There is a full laundry basket waiting to be washed.  No matter.

There are cards to be written, emails to be returned, plants thirsting for water.  No matter.

I am having the day off.  That's what matters now!

As many of you know, there was good news on the colon cancer front today.  It appears that I will be heading for liver resection surgery at the end of July or the beginning of August.  The surgeon expects to remove about 90% of my tumors while taking about 50% of my liver.

Thanks to our Creator for making us with regenerative livers!  After my liver regrows, we will revisit my status to see if a stage 2 resection of the remaining 10% of the tumors make sense.

Interesting liver resection fact #1: They don't just take out the area where the tumors are now...they take out the areas where the tumors showed at diagnosis.  So while I have shrunk the number of tumors and the volume of remaining tumors by half (thanks to God, prayers, chemo, diet, visualization and good fortune), they still take out the chunks that used to have tumors there. 

Interesting liver resection fact #2:  They'll also be taking out my gall bladder at the same time.

Interesting liver resection fact #3: (For those who've had hemocolectomies, stomach resections and/or been at bedside for people who have)--NO TUBE DOWN THE THROAT!  Yaay!

So...now to what I'm asking YOU to do.  One of the sites that I find most useful in this fight (C3--Colorectal Cancer Coalition)...and coincidentally the site where I first ran across my second opinion doctor, Heinz-Josef Lenz, is part of a contest to receive a $25,000 grant to upgrade their social media capabilities.

I'm asking folks to support this by voting for C3 to receive the funds for two reasons:

1.  Colon cancer is the 3rd most common form of cancer, yet it lags behind in awareness by a significant degree other forms of cancer (breast, lung, prostate to name a few...heck, since Ruth Ginsberg and Patrick Swayze are both fighting it, we probably lag behind pancreatic cancer in awareness).

2.  Colon cancer is highly preventable if caught early, during screenings.  Social media will be critical to getting younger folks (20-40) to recognize symptoms that could lead to screenings and save their lives...literally.

So please click on the link below to C3 help get the word out.  If you twitter or have a Facebook account, there are other ways to help, listed below.



§If you haven’t voted for C3 yet, do it. Now. Click this link, fill in your email address and submit. MindComet will only use your email address to make sure all votes are unique.

§If you have a Twitter account, then copy/paste this message into a tweet and post. Each tweet counts as an additional vote (only the first tweet counts, no ballot stuffing).

RT to help Colorectal Cancer Coalition Inc. win a 25K social media makeover http://ow.ly/4pcs @CommuniCause #cause2455

§Post about this to your Facebook wall, including this link which will automatically fill in our organization name: http://www.communicause.com/2455. Your friends and family probably already know that colorectal cancer matters to you. Let them know that their support of this campaign is important to you too.

Thanks y'all!

(To be sung to the tune of "Reunited.")

I did a bit of noodling around some interesting political articles today, but don't have the oomph to write about them (or respond to posts) yet.  And I've got questions to write out for the surgeon still.  So this disconnect blurt will have to do.

I did have a productive day.  Met with my sister-in-law Cindy this morning via Skype.  Worked on the first draft of another section of Golf on Monday, Chemo on Tuesday.  Did some catch up on emails.  Had lunch with my lovely Mom.

Now it's off to the couch to write questions, do some reading, and maybe watch some television.  My body's really wanting a break, so I'm gonna give it to me.

Cheers!  Fingers crossed and prayers uttered, please, for the visit with the surgeon tomorrow.

I'm back from my (very mild) infusion feeling a bit loopier than usual with the start of the 5FU.  Maybe it's just that I'm tired after 4 rounds of golf (54 holes total) in 5 days.  At any rate, I am headed to the couch for a little television viewing.

I re-met a wonderful woman in chemo today.  She's two years into her chemo treatments and looks wonderfully healthy.  (She has a different type of cancer but was also stage IV when diagnosed.)  We agreed that positive attitude, exercise, and prayer all play important roles in our battles against cancer.  In my case, I also throw in visualization and yoga.  She does water aerobics and takes trips with her grandkids.

What a blessing to sit with her for the first half of chemo and have her "infuse" me with good energy.

That's all for now!  Thanks for checking in.

There was a very interesting article in the LA Times today about how the drought, combined with efforts to protect endangered small fish, has impacted farming in the San Joaquin Valley.  Farmers are letting fields go fallow (reverting back to the desert status that the valley was before homesteaders and eventually farmers brought water into the area) and thus farmworkers are out of work.  Unemployment in the area is above the California average by 3.9%, but in some towns the unemployment figure is 39%.

A few months back, there was a similar article in National Geographic about Australia's farming community (also located in a former desert and dependent on water from other areas) and its collapse after seven years of drought on that continent. 

It strikes me that there are a couple of fundamental issues that will need to be addressed in this time of global climate change (or, if you are one of the few who don't believe the preponderance of scientific opinion, during times of drought).

1.  Is it the best practice to irrigate former deserts in order to grow our food?

2.  Are there ways of conserving water from non-agricultural uses in cities that demand water (and in Australia's case, trump agricultural water rights) that can help tide farmers over while we are working on #1?

The more I read about these types of issues, the more I realize that we need systemic approaches to problems that we've previously seen as easily addressed through human intervention.  In the case of California, we brought water to the desert, not realizing how that would impact the deltas during drought years; where seawater replaces fresh and kills fertile areas of our wetland ecosystem.

No suggestions for solutions from me...I'm far too new to this.  But it does get me thinking that sometimes our initial solutions cause more problems than the original issue did.