johnpowell

My teeth were not in the best shape going into this. But the risk was high that the radiation would kill my teeth and need to be removed anyway. The problem here is that I was going to be monumentally fucked from the radiation/chemo and they weren't sure my body could handle pulling teeth if they died.

And dead teeth just sitting in there could cause osteonecrosis of the jaw. Essentially a dead jaw. Then they would have to remove my jaw and that would be insane. So I opted to just have all my teeth pulled in one shot and get dentures later. And it wasn't some random dentist looking to profit saying I needed to have them pulled. Two ear, neck and throat doctors, a oral surgeon, two oncologists, and a radiologists all agreed that it was essential.

A little over a year ago I was diagnosed with cancer. I have had all my teeth removed, had a feeding tube (PEG) installed, chemo, liver biopsy, and more random horrible shit. I went from terrified of needles to getting more of them than I can count.

You adjust.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sunil_Tripathi

Then I switched to ecosia.org, I know it is a front-end for Bing. But it is clean interface and the search results are more in-line with what Google would return. In months I have had to use Google for search arount ten times in the last month. And that was to find stuff I already searched on Google. But I knew what I was looking for was obvious.

But it has been a year and they treat the cancer, and then another scan and there is a new spot, rinse and repeat.

Another round of radiation starts next week. So not a terrible idea to keep some pills around. But this batch of radiation should be easy. 5 treatments over two weeks. Probably won't even get a sunburn from it!. And it might seem odd to be really happy about radiation. But I was thinking it would be another few months of chemo. So radiation is fantastic.

As long as I felt that they tried I would be alright.

Our wonderful journey wouldn't cut it. But a simple, we went broke would be cool.

I guess I should mention that I am poor-ish. Right now I am getting lumber from a reclaimed lumber place and making furniture in a Amish style. Then my sister paints and distresses it. So if a bunch of random five dollar charges hit my account at once and I am not expecting them it could be a problem.

I can deal with a large one time payment. A bunch of random 5 dollar a payments a month isn't going to float. I crawl through my credit card statements looking for oddities. And it just bugs me.

I found that lorazepam and a Advil helped more.

And from my experience the most egregious prescribers of opioids aren't doctors, but dentists. I got 30 hydrocodone for having a tooth pulled. That is absurd.

I know, Bing.. But I have used Windows for about 30 minutes in the last year and that was just to help my mom fix her printer. I don't think I have ever had a Microsoft related account since Hotmail. I know they track me but I don't use MicrosoftDrive or WintowsTube so I can live with it.

Not sure what to think of this. But it is there.

I don't really want to comment.. But here we are.

And I had practiced (sitting at my desk) once I knew what had to be done and really struggled. No doubt, once they said I could breathe I spent a few minutes gasping for air.

But I have been shooting hoops for about 45 minutes everyday in the driveway for months. So my cardio is way better than the first time I had to do this. This time will be a picnic. The nice thing about radiation is they let you pick what music you want. Being the horrible person I am I use it as a way to introduce the radiation techs to new music.

I have Comcast and my upload on a good day is 500KB/s and that cripples everything else on the network.

I'm extremely claustrophobic so I take a number of pills before each treatment to relax.

Last time I had this done they stopped it seven times for about 90 seconds each time. The first time they did a countdown from 90 letting me know how long to hold my breathe. The countdown made it about a billion times worse so I asked them to stop. Now I just close my eyes and let the pills take me to a better place.

This is ideal since I can deal with a bit more radiation and I was worried I was looking at more chemo. I'm really sick of chemo, but as long as it it isn't neck/mouth radiation it is easy.

So next week I go in for a "simulation" where I get put in a person-sized beanbag and they put in a IV to inject contrast and then they stick me in a CT machine to map out exactly where they need to radiate. And then they suck the air out of the beanbag and mold it around you. A "Han Solo frozen in carbonite" situation. That way you can't move when they actually administer the radiation. That and they shove a tube in your mouth and turn off your breathing for a while so your abdomen doesn't move. The first time having my breathing turned off was a problem. But I have hitting the cardio hard for the last six months so it should be a breeze.

Hopefully radiation will start the week after that. And it is only five treatments (20 minutes) spread out over two weeks. Chemo would have been months of significant discomfort. It is all horrible but this is a lot less horrible. But now that there is a real plan to deal with this I am in a much better head-space. I was a bit of a grump until a few days ago. Now I am happy working on stuff around the house instead of just sitting and bitching about everything.

But 80% of the episodes deal with Ponzi schemes claiming unrealistic returns. Part of me feels bad for the people. The other part doesn't since they think they can get a 5% return a month. If you can do 5% a month wall street will toss trillions at you.

But I took a lot of auto-tech, three years of it. And the funny thing is I have never gotten my license. I'm nearly 45 years old and have never been able to legally drive a car.

But I was living with my sister at the time who was 18 and our landlord had a weird crush on her. Our landlord also owned a ton of properties in Eugene. And he would have me mow as many lawns as I wanted for 8 bucks a hour. Most of his rentals were to elderly people. I was making double the minimum wage and had no shortage of work. But I also had a girlfriend and skateboarding and bowling league to attend to. I did the minimum to maintain to healthy balance. If I needed new shoes I would mow a extra lawn. Skateboarding is hard on shoes. I would go through a pair a month.

But eventually I found myself doing auto stuff for people after mowing their lawns. I would get scheduled for oil changes, filters, plugs, brakes.. Eventually I was mostly doing auto maintenance for people and I charged significantly more. I had a lot of cash for a kid in high school with a Operation Ivy T-shirt.

Enter the internet.

My buddy Billy went to the University and could get me a cheap computer. This was back when Apple had serious discounts for students. I got a Performa 6214, Stylewriter 1200, and 14" Multisync monitor for about $900. A significant discount.

And Bill gave me his dial-up info into his university account. He gave it out to a lot of people. They didn't check if multiple people were using it. Back then we mostly looked up stuff about how to make LSD and mortal kombat fatality codes. It was Amazing. And a lot of very slow loading scans from porno mags.

But a person that was exploring this new thing that was non-commercial with me had a forward-thinking father. He was a real-estate agent and thought the internet was cool. So he wanted to put his listings on the internet that nobody would ever possibly use for looking at houses. Images were brutal since dial-up was the norm. And we used tables since css wasn't a thing back then.

But we made a commercial site. A site for a real-estate agent. And we hosted it on the university's of Oregon's site since we didn't really know how to get a domain name or find hosting. But it was pure HTML.

He paid us well to update the site with new listings. But then the dot.com thing happened and I got a job at a movie theater and wouldn't touch the internet until 2002.

edit :: I forgot to add that I think I might have been responsible for making the internet worse.

But I also realize that the 99% of the other people out there that have never heard of it deserve some privacy too.

But then I got a blast of truth.

Shaun, the friend I hung out with a lot was having problems at home and had just turned 18. I was also moving out so we looked at a few apartments. We found a great one that was cheap and Shaun was hesitant. It was ours and we could afford it but he hesitated.

A few days later someone told me he didn't want to live with me because, "I was a tedious asshole and living with me would be miserable".

This was brutal. This is a guy that everyday we head out to the U.S Bank underpark to skate. While good friends he thinks living with me would be horrible. So then my mind went a bit wild and I figured that all my friends thought the same.

So I changed. I am not a tedious asshole anymore. I will correct you if you are really wrong. But I am not going to point out your rounding error so I can feel superior.

I'm not that weird about change and normally accept it and end up not caring. But I have tried to get used to tabs on top and it just isn't happening. If I can no longer have that I guess I will need to get used to Safari. Or I will just keep using Firefox and not update and accept the security implications.