Platelet demonstration

Had a good night sleep and woke up about 6:00, through the daily routine we go. I rearranged the room, putting the table in front of the window since Dana is home with a cold. I put up the cool eagle soaring poster that Barry and Stacy got me over the headboard area. Looks more like a single dorm room than a hospital room. Tomorrow I have to fix the blog photo issue somehow.

When the docs come the head guy has changed, and that's OK, I feel like I have a lot of expert people watching over me. So the docs say you are getting Elspar and platelets today, and I say oh, the platelets are that low? Yep, but we'll fix you right up. Within minutes I start to get a slight nosebleed, thought my nose was running for a second. Right on cue. That is what I love about this place, they have seen it all before, no surprises, big upside. No big deal, lie down, have my platelets, nosebleed gone.

I had another elevator ride with the green kid the other day, meant to write about it but felt I was violating some ethic maybe. Guess not. So I asked him, Can I ask you what you have? He tells me he cannot absorb any nutrition from what he eats or drinks, he has to get it all intravenously. I said Do you eat, and he says Yeah, I just don't get anything from it. I'm here getting a new IV tube. Wow.

My pal AL the RN just came in, took my temp, he didn't need any other vitals. Good-natured friendly guy. He goes in the bathroom and notes the measure on my pee jar, then empties and cleans it. I had to ask him, because I have been thinking of it on my evening walk, do we really need to keep measuring the pee, why don't I just count how many times I pee and figure 350ml a shot, gotta have an average by now. Isn't it better to handle the pee less, and I have been using a toilet fairly accurately for a good 45+ years? Al says you have to be accurate. I argue for materiality, but no, you gotta measure, he says, you're on chemo. Later he suggests I do a spreadsheet and get the average, so I' think I'll do the next 20 and check the standard deviation of my pee volume.

One of the questions I have been tossing around in the early hours of the morning is, I wonder if there is some specific incident that set up the trigger for leukemia in me. I remember when I was about 10 or 11, I think, and one of the older guys in the neighborhood, Gary, he was about 14 I think, had us all in the Gaynor's backyard fort snorting gasoline fumes from a can. I remember you got very dizzy and sorta passed out. Hmmmm. I think Gary became a junkie. He shot me once from his garage with a CO2 pellet, had the garage door pulled to like 2 feet from the ground and had created a bunker in there, and shot me as I walked home from school. Got me in the forearm, I remember looking at this sudden sting on my arm and seeing this little pellet hanging on, not breaking skin but pressed in there. I looked around and when I saw Gary in his bunker I got the hell out of there.

I wonder about those malathion spills back in the days of groundskeeping, I was pretty careful but there were those couple of spills? Then there were all those ingestibles, don't even want to think about that stuff. Was it that chemical plant in Peacedale that smelled so sickeningly sweet you knew it was toxic every time you drove by? Was it the time Darren Kiley and I broke up Mark Crook's styrofoam sailboat in the Bay, first the rudder breaking and me acting as rudder, then the boom braking and we both had to paddle that sucker in? You could just about walk on parts of that bay; good quahogging though. Or was it the time I was crispy-fried in the boat fire and jumped in the Bay to simmer while waiting for the ambulance?

This kind of thinking cannot get you anywhere, of course, but it is part of the process you have to go through before you agree it is circular, spherical even, cannot be answered and leads to webs of other questions, then you drop it.

Gloria Z came to visit today, and we had a great time ranting and raving about all kinds of things, I love that about Gloria, she is well-informed and can rant with the best of us. By the time we were done we had solved all the world's really important problems. Here are my rules to solve the world in 4 generations:

• Really really promote interbreeding among race, religion and country. I had to change this from forced inter-marriage between races, religions and countries, too radical and I couldn't have married Dana if that were true.
• Freedom of religious choice, but a worldwide ban on proselytizing.
• Pick a world standard of living and control population to get to it.
• Spend 50% of all non-renewable resources creating renewable resources; end dependence on oil before WW-OIL. It will run out.
• World government, i.e. people are governed at a world level. We don't put up with shit like Somalia or the non-signing of the Kyoto accord, not for a minute. As we grow we are able to make all these leaps in the area of our thinking, from our house to our street to our class to our school to our city to our state to our country, but then we stop right there. We need to make that one more leap, to our world, because it is the fixed ecosystem.
  
  I should add Nick's rule - all Americans have to travel somewhere globally, outside North America, for a couple of years, to gather a sense of worldliness over xenophobia.

I measured the evening walk with the pedometer, it was 3000 steps or a little over a mile. I had a total of 5788 steps, maybe 2000 of those just moving around in here. The full length of a corridor is about 1000'.

Quote of the day from email:

"And Holy Fucking Shnaynkie on the regimen of chemo they got in store for you but my (limited) understanding is that you hit hard and furious right up front with this stuff. Anything less, and your talkin' cack". A doc pal. Shnaynkie?