Reid Levin is a New York City writer, actor and comedian who is currently undergoing treatment for leukemia in his hometown of Denver, CO.
Reid writes and acts in sketch comedy videos and performs with Better Than The Machine around the country. He is a regular contributor to the humor website Smosh.com. Reid is also the co-creator of the NBC comedy webseries The Guys in 3A.
Reid acts in commercials and films, and has lent his voice to several cartoons.
Yesterday, I woke up feeling like a million bajillion bucks (cash, unmarked bills). I felt stronger and less fatigued than I’ve felt in two months. Yesterday, I held myself up taller than I have in a long time. Lots of people say it’s easy to tell how I’m feeling based on how tall I am–that I slouch lower and lower the worse I feel. I think, based on how many more bald spots, horns, and lines of latitude and longitude I can see when I’m feeling well, this is probably true.
Yesterday, I went to the Hem/Onc Clinic (legal disclaimer: The Hem/Onc Clinic is the Hematology and Oncology Clinic at TCH and bears no relation to He-Monc, a character from the “Masters of the Universe” franchise, owned by Mattel) for some scheduled blood work. The blood work’s two main purposes were:
1) To check my ferritin level. Ferritin, according to Wikipedia, “serves to store iron in a non-toxic form, to deposit it in a safe form, to transport it to areas that it is required, and to free the slaves.” I’m fairly sure that last thing was actually attributable to Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation, but hey, it’s Wikipedia, it happens. Ferritin also serves as an indicator of how much iron is in a person’s body. A normal male has 16 – 30 incredibly small measurements of mass (m) per teeny-tiny measurements of volume (v). I don’t remember the units of measurement we’re using here. It could be moles per liter or picomoles per deciliters, or any of hundreds of other measurements, but I’m just gonna say I don’t remember and use the m/v so I don’t make myself look like I have less than the very minor understanding I have of what I’m talking about. Also, don’t picomoles with Avogadro sauce sound delicious? Yeah they do.
Anyway, back to the thing I know so much about that’s been plaguing my body since at least January. Last Wednesday, I had a blood test that revealed I had 311 m/v of ferritin in my blood. I can tell you, as someone who knows about these things, that 311 is a much, much higher number than the 30 m/v that is the top of the range that healthy males should have. So all the stuff I wrote about last week is pretty likely to be almost certainly close to the cause of the proposed theory about how I was feeling fatigued and was losing my hair and–y’know what, you can go read that post for yourself. I don’t have time to summarize all my other posts just for you. I’m a guy who knows stuff about moles and hectoliters and iron, which is really the important thing here.
Right, so last Wednesday, I had 311 m/v of ferritin. I met with my new hematologist, who agreed that 311 is a much bigger number than 30, and since we’d already tried the vampire method (from that other post you totally just read), she said I should go on these pills that will help me out, but we can’t get them at a normal pharmacy, they have to be delivered, like pizza, to our house. Judging from how many times they get our pizza order wrong, I’m not sure I feel comfortable letting them deliver my medicine. But I guess I don’t really have a choice. Or do I?
Yes, well maybe. I don’t know. Yesterday’s blood work showed that I had 202 m/v of ferritin which, while still significantly more than 30 m/v, is a lot less than 311 m/v. This would seem to indicate that I am on a fast decline of ferritin, and therefore, reserves of iron. I still signed all the papers to get the pizza place to deliver my pills, but I think before I start taking the pills, I need to talk to my new hematologist, who was not at the clinic yesterday. Or today.
2) The second big purpose for the blood work yesterday was to check my ANC. Which is basically, a measure of a person’s (my) immune system, based on some wacky mathematical hoobajoob. Luckily, there are no units of measurement to forget. Last week, my ANC was 300ish and this week it was 1150. My cutoff for receiving chemotherapy is 500. I am officially back on the chemotherapy wagon! Hooray… kind of! They did not slowly ease me back in to the chemo, I think they decided to make up for lost time. They just sorta told me to close my eyes tight and climb, and then they said, “You can open your eyes,” and I was like, “Oh no!” but by that time, they had already pushed me from the high dive into the little backyard kiddie pool filled with big doses of chemotherapy drugs.
I should really take a moment to address the overuse and misuse of metaphors on the Internet, since I just dropped that excellently crafted one in the last paragraph that metaphored my going back on all those chemo drugs to be pushed off a high dive. So take note, all you Internet people (Interneople? Internipple? netizens? is that right? it’s some crappy portmanteau like that… whatever, any of those are good enough for Chief Justice of the Supreme Court of the United States of America John Roberts, so they’re good enough for me), I don’t want to hear any of your dumb metaphors for any reason, but I am free to to spout all the dumb metaphors I want.
Last night, I took all my chemo pills and said goodbye to feeling good. By this morning, I felt crappy and bitter. My one day of feeling really, really good and tall was but a distant memory. I feel intensely crappy; everything hurts. That really sums it up. I feel hopeful, though, that my body might be dealing with the iron overload on its own. Hopefully it will plunge another 100 points by next week, since I did not receive an injection of vincristine, the chemotherapy drug voted most likely to be the cause of all the problems I’ve had in 2010. Yes, including my run-in with the IRS and, of course that hunter shooting me with three tranq darts, ’cause he thought I was a moose roaming around downtown Denver–but those are stories for another day. I don’t know how likely it is to count on my body regulating iron correctly now, but I hope that’s what’s happening. Nobody has really indicated it was not happening, but I guess nobody’s really indicated anything at all, so for all I know, maybe this whole iron problem will be gone tomorrow. Maybe it’s gone now!
Thursday April 22nd 2010, 1:01 am
Filed under: Word Nerd
Who came up with this whole glass half-empty or half-full concept? As far as I am concerned, this metaphor is old and boring; frankly, it has exhausted its usefulness. Why, kids today are hardly even aware of its existence, let alone where they stand on the issue of how much water is in the glass. I don’t want to get beat to the punch here like we did with that whole “dead horse” fiasco. Let’s just go ahead do away with this stodgy old figure of speech and roll out a new hipper, edgier, sexier metaphor. Something cool the kids will pick up on. I’ve got it! From now on, there is no glass, there is no water. From now on, you see the situation as half-clothed, while I see it as half-naked. Genius!
–Reid.
P.S. Maybe we should go with “nekkid” instead of “naked”; kids just love misspelling things these days!
I am awake and cannot seem to fall asleep. I started feeling hungry around two o’clock, and did my best to ignore it. After doing some light reading, the sensation overwhelmed me. I was extremely hungry, even though I had a full dinner. When was dinner anyway, I started asking myself, I think it was at least five hours ago. My appetite has been up and down every day; it has been very unpredictable. But at that moment, I knew I wanted to eat something. So I went upstairs and rummaged through the cupboard and fridge, and settled on a mid-night snack of Havarti and Lite Club Crackers. I brought the various components for the snack downstairs with me, laid them all out, and prepared each cracker with a bit of cheese. In my head, I could hear the voice of Wallace urging me on, and complimenting me on my selection of cheese. My selection of the Danish Havarti was an excellent one, I could hear him say, although he prefers Wensleydale, of course.
The spread of six crackers, each with a small pieces of cheese atop it, will not remain uneaten for long. I think about going in to the clinic tomorrow and getting my vitals checked. I think about kilograms and how I like seeing those numbers because they mask a true understanding of my current weight. I know the math to convert kilograms to pounds, but remain happy and content not to do so. I know what number I always want to be, or be below, although I think about 111 kg and what a weak goal that is. Yet, with this cheese and these crackers, I’m not sure I’ll even make it to 111. I feel embarrassed for my tomorrow self.
Nobody will give the number a second glance after it’s put into the computer. No one else will think, “That’s a loootta kilograms!” They check it every time a patient comes in, so that they can figure out dosing for meds, some of which are based on, of all things, surface area. Others are just based on weight. The number will stick with me for a couple of days, though, not that I feel up to doing anything in the realm of exercise during my days and nights all usually spent sleeping these days. I shouldn’t be worrying about this right now, at this moment of treating two different blood diseases, and a host of other issues. I just can’t ever seem to get it out of my head if it’s over 111kg, and it makes me angry at myself for the rest of the day.
We used to talk a lot about how, when I was in the hospital for so long in ’08, I lost so much weight. It was a good thing, but not done in a good way. It was extremely unhealthy, and yet I can vividly remember weighing in at 101 kg, the lightest I’ve been in years. It was bad, the staff feared I might go under 100 kg too fast, and my weight might just keep plummeting until there was nothing left of me but skin and bones–there wouldn’t be any Reid to treat for leukemia. All I can remember, from staring at that 101 on the scale was thinking, “Awesome.”
My psychologist told me that it is extremely common for cancer patients to find things about their cancer that they secretly consider good and are happy about, but they feel extremely embarrassed to feel this way. It’s common to carry this guilt that I might actually be happy with the leukemia that has so devastated my body and that so many people have helped me fight. She assures me that this is extremely common, that most patients of serious long term diseases eventually force themselves to focus on good aspects of what’s going on. It might be spending more time with their family, it might be that they’re the center of attention, it might be that they like being driven around. I hate the leukemia, and I want this whole thing to be over. But part of me just keeps thinking about that 101 on that scale.
There are five crackers with cheese left. I feel so hungry, which is very unusual of late. I’ve just been feeling really full, or having stomachaches lately. And I hardly ran any marathons to boost my appetite. The biggest event was dinner last night. I just… feel so ashamed about all of this, but I think eating in the middle of the night is something for which I’ll be beating myself up over for a long time.
Maybe writing this will have distracted me from eating and I’ll just be able to fall asleep without eating the other crackers. It’s worth a shot, but, I have a feeling that I’ll be sitting down with Wallace before I fall asleep, and that we’ll both be enjoying our cheeses.
Better Than The Machine’s sexy new video “Med School Porn” proves that while med school’s expensive, paying the bills doesn’t have to be anything but fun! Also, of some noteworthiness, this our 100th video on YouTube! That’s a helluva lot of videos on YouTube! Trust me, it took a long, long time to for the five of us to count that high on our combined fingers and toes. We kept reaching 99, until Matt Gallo revealed that he’s missing a toe. And if you think that’s sexy, you’re gonna love this video:
“Med School Porn” was directed and edited by Ballard C. Boyd. Rachel Popson guest stars as “The Girl Who Is Not Christina, For Once,” which is to say, she was the girl who poured beer on herself. Rachel’s a great actor that we went to school with. Rachel and her girlfriend Joanna (an alumna of BTTM) participated in a triathlon last summer to raise money for leukemia patients and studies. They participated in my name (and someone else’s too), which was an amazing thing to do. So, Rachel’s good people. As if you couldn’t already tell that by her agreeing to appear in one of our videos wearing only erotic underwear. Sometime this spring or summer, I think Rachel and Joanna are going to come stay with my family, which should be a lot of fun, and it’s certainly something I’m looking forward to!
Anyway, back to the sketch. Christina came up with the idea and wrote the original draft. She then asked me to take a look at it. I’ve found that I always really enjoy working on second drafts of Christina’s scripts. She lays down superb groundwork that forms the plot and some of the character’s voices, and so the first thing I do when she asks me to look over something is just to read the script and understand what she’s doing. Then I take a pass at some light editing, which is mostly trimming it down by saying, “Oh, these three lines could be just this one line and it’d make perfect sense,” or, “this line could just be these two words, instead of explaining all that,” which is easy for me (ahem, on other people’s work, not necessarily my own verbose sketches or blogs, so much) and that’s something I like to do.
Then I take a third pass which is the really fun part of working on Christina’s sketches. To me, they seem so well formed already that I don’t have to think all that much about plotting, I can just add a lot of jokes. She sets them up so well that I go through her scripts fast, and just see jokes all over and add them. She and I try to get together and write whenever I’m in town, and it’s a very different way of working than I’ve ever worked with a writing partner before. I have to say I really enjoy it, whether in person or not. Now, just so this doesn’t sound tooooo egotistical, I will say thank goodness for Microsoft Word’s “Track Changes” feature, so that when we’re working through email, she can see exactly what I’ve done to her script, and she can go with some of my ideas and quickly delete all the ones that don’t work outside of my brain.
I was just looking back at what I had added, and a lot of it was Matt’s pizza guy, which seemed so funny to me on paper. But I’ve got to hand it to Matt and Ballard for interpreting those words and then really selling them. Matt mugging to the camera is just hilarious, and I think it really sells all those lines for a great laugh. Matt’s versatility just keeps expanding, especially when I think back to the first video I ever shot of him. I’m really impressed by how he can help jokes on the page really become the jokes that work so well on the screen.
Producer Christina also did a really good job of producing this stuff, which included getting Rachel on board, and buying props and setting costumes and things like that. Producing is clearly a job we should have given her several years ago.
My favorite moment in the sketch is not from any script I ever saw, and that’s when Carlos walks up, and Matt signals to him to go away. I thought that was really funny. I would guess, but I don’t know for certain, that this was something Ballard came up with while filming. His mind is very attuned to building laughs and jokes that really add a good beat here or there. Ballard also did a good job working in a really weird location. Having slept on the floor of Christina and Alex’s apartment last time I was in The City, I can tell you that the door is around a big corner, so that basically, where Christina and Rachel were sitting was a backwards “L” shape away from the door. I don’t know where Ballard stood, but the going back and forth and keeping Christina so close to the camera really gave the appearance that everyone could see each other, which they probably couldn’t. I trust Ballard and his director magic fully to be able to do that–we’ve shot so many things at his very, very small studio apartment and none of them really look like the same place. I don’t think I could pull that off.
I think the one and only thing that I wonder how other people feel about is Christina’s last line. Again, I don’t think that was ever in a script, so I’ll bet there was some brainstorming that went on before they shot the video. In looking over my edits, the ending I wrote was that the pizza guy leaves and Christina looks to Rachel and yells, “And you put all your clothes back on!” to which Rachel responded, “Oh yeah, I forgot.” Which I will admit sucked. I figured someone would come up with something, like Rachel saying, “Oh, but I’m so comfy!” or “Oh, no just girl on girl, then, either?” I guess I thought of those too late (15 seconds ago), and they probably wouldn’t have been used anyway. But the first time I watched it, I was pretty startled at what Christina ended up saying! In watching it an extraordinary number of times, I think I’m desensitized to it now, but on first hearing it, I shouted, “What?! Where’d that come from?” Like I said, I don’t mind it so much now. Neither, apparently do YouTubers, who are eating the video up. The video was briefly featured on the YouTube Comedy page, and even more briefly on the YouTube Videos page. The search for porn seems to have really helped us out.
All in all, I’m quite happy with this sketch, and I am quite happy to have another sexy sounding video that will continue to attract potential masturbators for a long time. Hah! I’ll bet they’ll be none-too-happy.
–Reid.
P.S. Matt is not actually missing a toe. Sorry to wait to reveal this ’til the end, you creepy, creepy, nine-toe-fetishists.
Quick recap: in 2008 when I was suffering from hemorrhagic pancreatitis, I was losing a tremendous amount of blood. I was receiving transfusions constantly, and the worse I got, the more of other people’s blood was put inside me. I’m definitely thankful for that and to all those people, but unfortunately, I’m now experiencing problems from all those transfusions.
I don’t have anything like hepatitis or other worse things one could get from transfusions (thank goodness). It’s not that I had a specific bad transfusion (in this particular instance), it’s that I got so many transfusions. One of the effects of losing a lot of blood and having new blood constantly pumped in like this is that the body starts hoarding all the iron it can. The body uses iron to move oxygen around, but only relatively small amounts are necessary for this. I have a huge, huge iron overload. Somewhere in the range of (relatively small normal amount) x 150,000. Huge!
I’ve been losing my hair (without any changes in medication, or growing older). I’ve been incredibly fatigued and weak for months. I’ve been Rip Van Winkle-level sleepy. From these symptoms, we were able to pinpoint this iron problem. I’ve got to give my mom a lot of credit for doing research and pushing all this iron business along. I certainly don’t mean to put any of my oncology doctors or nurses in any bad light, but my mom, through her researching CDC material, really pursued some alternate ideas of what was going on and she was right. Other possible effects of “heavy metal poisoning” or “iron toxification” or “iron overload” include the metal overloading the liver and kidneys, bad bacteria that eat iron building up, and all sorts of other crappy lethal things. For instance, as I posted recently, Magneto killing me dressed as a security guard.
There are really two ways to solve this problem (the iron, not Magneto). One is to drain some blood out of my body regularly (maybe even for several years with the amount of iron I have), the other is a medication called a chelator. When this was recognized as the problem, my oncologist chose to try the phlebotomy method of putting me in a dark room with vampires. The problem with this method, aside from the puncture wounds, intolerance to light, and sudden aversion to crosses, stakes, and holy water, is that it barely took out any iron from my blood, and instead dropped my ANC drastically.
ANC, which stands for “ay en sea” or “Absolute Neutrophil Count,” is a mathematical formula that determines the blood composition in a body (white cells, red cells, hemoglobin), based on a small sample of blood. A normal ANC is above 1,500 cells per microliter. If someone has an ANC less than 500 cells per microliter, they are “neutropenic” meaning they are just asking to get infected, as if they were flaunting it, “My immune system is barely working, come and infect me, aw yeah.” It is very, very rare that I would not be taken off of my normal chemotherapy regimen with an ANC lower than 500. My ANC’s been hovering around 350 since the phlebotomies, and as a result, I’ve been off chemo for over a month. As much as I dislike having to go through chemotherapy treatments, I’m starting to feel very anxious about being off it for so long.
You might think I should be dancing in the streets after being off chemo for so long, but unfortunately, you don’t know the whole story and thus your opinions on where and when I should do my dancing are totally useless. Okay, okay… wait! Come back, I didn’t mean it. Here, I’ll explain it more so you can be more informed. It’s not like this entry wasn’t already long enough, right? No wait, I was kidding! Really, I’ll explain it, come on!
Like I mentioned, a low ANC gets you sick, and due to a lack of cells, makes you tired, weak, and boring. The reason my oncologist tried the phlebotomy method first was that he didn’t want to put me on a new drug, due to my history of getting all the .01% chance side effects. So it made sense. However, after feeling super crappy for over a month and tiring of sleeping in a coffin, not being able to eat anything with garlic in it, and having these weird dreams about being a bat and… necking with a lot of people… maybe(?) (I can’t quite remember) it’s time to try the chelator. Basically, the chelator works like a magnet (I said like a magnet; stop throwing rocks through my windows, scientists!) and gathers up all the unnecessary metals in one’s body to be easily peed out.
Luckily, the oncology clinic at the hospital is actually officially the “oncology and hematology clinic.” That’s why I don’t know half the staff there. But, today, after talking to my oncologist and recommending to him that I go on all the pills the TV told me to tell my doctor about, he turned me over to Dr. Hayes, a hematologist who will be working with me for (hopefully) just the next year to get this heavy metal problem under control with an oral chelator. If I’m experiencing too many side effects from the oral chelator, I have to use the subcutaneous version, which involves sticking myself with a needle five times a week and a pump, which I assume pumps the chelator into my subcutaneousness. It has almost no side effects in this form.
I’m hoping the oral method works. I have to wait to get the pills, and I guess the FDA hasn’t approved them, so the company that makes them will deliver them to my house late next week or thereabouts. So, not only do I have to suffer through another week (or more) to get this started, I’m also clearly going to be at the mercy of a Mexican drug cartel. Sigh.
Again, since my ANC is so low, I am prone to get some pretty crappy things. I’m starting to get mouth sores. I know someone my age through a support group who said that when he went through chemotherapy, getting mouth sores was worse than getting his leg amputated as the result of being shot in Iraq. Now, I’ve never been to Iraq, so I can’t say I’ve been shot there, and I’ve never lost a limb anywhere. I’ve only had one case of mouth sores before, which sucked and hurt and was bad and awful, but I have to say, respectfully to the man who lost a limb for his country, that I’d prefer not losing a limb and having the damn things in my mouth. Hopefully, hopefully it will turn out to be a very light case.
Let’s see, I promised weather and sports… hmmmn. It’s been windy here, but very warm. 60′s to 70′s. That damn wind, though, it’s… windy.
And sports: The Avs are back in the playoffs at last (they just beat the Sharks tonight), and the Nuggets are gonna be in the playoffs against the Jazz, and the Rockies are doing good, at the beginning of their season, I guess. I can’t ever tell with baseball, because when people start talking about it, my mind wanders to more interesting topics, like how I’m annoyed by those ads promoting corn syrup as not the worst thing ever. Are board games sports? Well I don’t know, but tegardless, I hate the new Scrabble “rules.” Proper nouns? Spelling words backwards?! PLACING WORDS NOT CONNECTED TO OTHER WORDS?!?! It’s very hard playing games without rules. Don’t get me wrong, a good game of Baldertrapscrabopoly or Calvinball is fun every once in a while. But, without rules, we’re talking about sports anarchy.
Oh, also, this is sports related: Tiger Woods remains in the public interest enough that I will bet more people know who he is than know who won the Masters. I sure don’t know who won the Masters, but I’ll still bet those TV guys were psyched to have Tiger playing. Their ratings probably went up by 1,000%, so there were like… 1,000 people watching this year. I liked that ad with Tiger’s dad’s voice. I know a lot of people considered it wrong or creepy or dodging the issue to use his voice postmortem, but I thought it was effective as an acknowledgment that Tiger had done something wrong, and he wanted people to know that and hopefully we can stop hearing about him for two or three minutes. Oh, and I like those new ads were the Burger King breaks into McDonald’s headquarters and steals their breakfast menu, and then the voice over says “Hey, they may not be original, but they’re only a buck here.” I like it when public figures or companies acknowledge their problems, ’cause it seems rare that public figures ever do. Stupid lying corn syrup.
Thursday April 08th 2010, 11:55 pm
Filed under: Family
I have quite a backlog of posts left incomplete for whatever reason, posts I wondered and worried at the time if I should post, and then, a lot of crappy ideas I started but realized were crappy before I invested too much time in them (in most cases). I threw out the crappy stuff and decided that I want to go through and finish the other posts. I’ll start with a recent one. This post was originally started on March 29, 2010.
My stomach hurts at a 7 right now. It’s also just not accepting much solid food. I’d say I’ve been able to eat somewhere between “nothing” and “what little is left on the dirty plates we rinse in the sink then put in the dishwasher for the dog to lick” (before we run the dishwasher! Before!).
Despite this, going to the first Seder at Grandma’s tonight was important to me. I am absolutely certain that my grandparents have decades left in them, whether, as in one case, they’ve just got too much energy and too many things to do, or in another case, they’re just too darn stubborn to give into the concept of mortality (they probably see it as a left wing plot), I am convinced of their longevity. However, I’ve re-learned over the past year not to take any time with them for granted. It feels like a long, long time since I’ve had to face the passing of a loved one of my own, but in this regard, it has not been a good year for close friends.
As far as attending this year’s Passover Seder at Grandma’s, it was very special to me in particular. Two years ago, all of my family–my parents, my sisters, my grandma, my aunts, my uncles, my cousins–they all came to the hospital with their pesadecha food they’d baked and a Seder plate and some very, very abridged blessings for the first Seder. It will remain in my memory as one of the single greatest family evenings of my life, one that I hope I will be able to tell future generations about. Last year was less memorable, probably because it was a far more normal situation. I was confined to my house because my counts were too low, so I think we had a Seder or something very much like one with some of my sisters’ friends in tow. This year’s Seder, much to my delight, was an almost total return to normalcy, of which I will likely remember even less than last year’s.
When I poke a pinhole in time, starting with tonight and looking back at the same day in the previous two years, it is impossible for me to deny that the wheels of progress are definitely moving forward. No matter how sick I think I am feeling now, last year was worse, and the year before was much, much worse than that.
I’m glad I went. It was mostly a joy. Dad officiated, and like always, there was the traditional scrambling between my dad, my uncles, and me not to read the part of the “Simple Son” (I read the “Wise Son!”–though there were accusations of nepotism). I got to meet some interesting new friends, schmooze with the family, and just get out of the house for awhile for a non-medical reason–which felt good. I ate a bite of everything, including the delicious brisket and pot roast. However, these so-called “bird bites” were not looked upon kindly because, of course, I was not doing my part to eat enough of the feast and, clearly because of me alone, we were left with several more meals worth of extra food. Several meals for large banquet halls. I had to keep insisting my stomach just couldn’t take anymore, not because it didn’t taste good (quite the opposite!), but because it felt like it’d run out of room… just from those few bites. I will worry about that another day, though. Probably tomorrow.
–Reid.
Author’s note from the future: and just like I said, that very next day I worried to my heart’s content. L’Chaim!
To make this particularly important announcement, I was going to subtitle a video of that very famous soundbite by George Herbert Walker Bush, I (that’s supposed to be a roman numeral indicating the number one, but this font’s got no serifs!). I figured out that, if I subtitled that clip, it would be really easy to make it seem like he said, “Read. My. Lips: No New Cancers!” because people cheered over him saying “taxes,” and the words “taxes” and “cancers” would basically look the same coming out of his mouth. Then I spent some time looking for a decent copy of this video from the 1988 Republican National Convention. Then I realized that, actually, George Herbert Walker Bush, One’s promise was broken and he had, in fact, introduced taxes and I didn’t really want to, y’know, hex myself by putting this particularly important announcement into the mouth of a liar as he was lying, even if it was a savvy use of my video editing prowess.
Then I remembered, “hold the phone, I am a total idiot.”
I totally forgot that this Bush, One Roman Numeral guy, he created one of the worst things ever! So what was I even thinking in the first place? And theeen I remembered that I had already commented about this extremely offensive thing he had created in a very not safe for work video (here’s a hint that might be important based on where this extraordinarily not safe for work, but rib tickling and sonically jazzifying, get up and dance comment loads for you: he didn’t create you, the world, feminism, or The Constitution) (here’s another hint: this thing I so supremely dislike with every fiber of my being, he created it with his balls), so I gave up on the whole thing and decided I should probably just announce this particularly important thing from my own mouth and/or keyboard:
Dr. Surgeo Lookieloo, who performed yesterday’s poke ‘n drain on my upper digestive areas, felt strongly, based on the evidence he observed and collected from inside my gut, that the best time to explain his findings was while I was still deeply asleep from the general anesthetic that my Dad kept reminding me killed Michael Jackson. The doctor told my parents that there is a very good chance that in my abdomen, I do not have any organs that are infected with a new, different cancer, or any cancerous tumors. The pathology from all the poking will hopefully confirm this within a few weeks. Even without the pathology, though, the doctor indicated that he saw enough nocancer to say with certainty that there was no new cancer growing inside my stomach, or on my pancreas, or in my pancreas, or in the pseudo-cysts near my pancreas, or in some weird floaty legions near my pancreas, and that’s all I was told about before my mom said to stop asking her about my pancreas. She said that the doctor had seemed pretty darn sure that my entire abdomen was free from a new cancer. I asked if she’d ever heard of anyone getting cancer of the diaphragm, and I’m pretty sure she heard me but just chose to ignore my question.
This seems like a good time to bring up The Incredibly Improbable Statistic Of The Day for yesterday. The Incredibly Improbable Statistic Of The Day for Monday, April 5 was that when I finally woke up after my investigatory gastrointestinal surgey, I found out that my post-operating room nurse was from Vernon, a Township in New Jersey, about which Wikipedia states that “nobody knows how it got its name!” Woah! Isn’t that wild?! But even more statistically astonishing than that astonishing fact is that Vernon is where Carlos Cabrera hails from, and my post operating room nurse not only knew him by name, but had grown up with his older sister! Take that, Math!
The news is very good, even if it doesn’t answer the looming question of what I do have that’s causing my abdominal pain. It’s really good to know that it’s not any new cancer. In all seriousness, my parents really looked out for me yesterday, and went to bat for me and my best interests when there were some questions raised. They deserve a helluva of a lot of credit for that and an equally large amount of love for sitting around for seven hours and not falling asleep.
I’m trying to stay positive, and I think we have some legitimate new leads on what might be affecting me. The high concentration of iron in my blood (the reason why Reiman recently reminded me to avoid Magneto) might just be causing the problem we’re investigating–and a few others. But that’s a story for another day. Until then, stay cool, fair reiders! And Jamba Juice: you will continue making a sizable fortune off of me and my tender, tender tummy.
Sunday April 04th 2010, 11:20 pm
Filed under: Leukemia
In December of 2008, I underwent radiation therapy on my brain to clear out all the possible leukemia cells that might be hiding in the folds. Oddly, my hair began falling out before radiation started. Was it my stress about having my brain lit up with radiation, or had sitting atop my head osmosed my hair an intelligence of its own? Did it just figure, “Hey, we’re going to be falling out in a few days anyway, we might as well help Reid out and start falling out early”? Or maybe, “We know what’s about to happen; we’re getting out of here!” That’s probably it.
I’m going in tomorrow to hopefully get some answers and I find that, once again, my hair is falling out. I worry that it knows something I do not. I’ve been having a lot of problems for the past month, which have come and gone and come again. The problem, as I can see it, is that this thing leaves no evidence, and is therefore not easy to diagnose, and is even more difficult to cure. So maybe my hair is falling out now to say, “See! See!? Reid’s not crazy, he has a symptom you can see, and it’s all over your nice white couch!”
I’m tired. I’ve been tired since March began. I feel weak, and I reckon this may all have something to do with being unable to eat more than a few bites of any meal. I’m in pain. Constantly. My stomach hurts, but even my limbs groan when called to task. I think about problems from earlier this year. There are so many problems that have all seemed urgent that have been put off for this. Problems unsolved that I’ll have to deal with once this current anomaly is dealt with. That thought makes me even more tired.
I’m going in tomorrow. First, a very early trip to the Oncology Clinic to get platelets transfused into me. I think about all the blood I’ve been given, and how thankful I am for people donating it. But I also think about the huge levels of iron in my body that likely exist from being transfused so many times. Has the iron suppressed my platelets? Is it the reason I’ve been off chemo for several weeks? I don’t know. I think about the discovery of the iron in my blood and it seems so long ago. It was last month.
After I go to the Oncology Clinic tomorrow, I will head to the U, the University of Colorado Hospital. I’ve always got to cut them some slack because they truly saved my life in a situation that had truly stacked all odds against me. But I still wander in there, thinking that their systems are confusing and seem overly bureaucratic to someone who spends most of his medical time at The Children’s Hospital. At the U tomorrow I will have an investigatory procedure. I will be put under, and someone who could very well be the GI doc I saw there one time last week, will perform an endoscopy, an internal ultrasound, and something I can only remember as sticking needles into my stomach to take samples.
Technically speaking, I don’t know why I’m going to the U tomorrow. The doctor I saw last week never mentioned it to me. The scheduler called us, and we had to make some phone calls just to make sure it was really supposed to happen. Then it was moved up from Wednesday to Monday. Again, I can only guess why that might be. Then my oncologists told me I needed to get transfused if this procedure was to happen–I wonder if they ever told that doctor in GI? I decided to stop focusing on these technical and bureaucratic issues and really focus on why I am going there tomorrow.
I’m going to get answers, and unlike my hair, I’ll be sticking around until I get some.
How can it be that seeing some of my best friends in the whole wide world–friends that I rarely get to see in person these days–can both make me feel worlds better, and at the same time, fill me with such a great sense of loss?
I have come to the simple conclusion that the world has gone on without me these past few years, and that no matter how I may feel about this, it will probably continue to do so.
First off, I will reiterate that this post isn’t about the health bill. It’s simply some good, old fashioned complaining about my health with little to no regard for anyone else’s suffering.
That said, my stomach mystery pains continue. Sure, the exhaustion and weakness, the poor eating, and the pain throughout my body all persist. But at its heart (not my heart, of course, it’s already committed to a series of complaints this summer), this is really, more than anything else, the story of a battle between a boy and his abdomen. I was checked out by a GI specialist at the University Hospital last week. He sent me to get a CT scan at the end of last week, the results of which he called us about today. My insides look very, very peculiar and worrisome he said. Tell us something we don’t know, we laughed in response, albeit more diplomatically and without the laughter. We told him this had been explained to us by a number of other doctors before, the result of many different things and people wreaking havoc in there over the past few years.
Everything was first messed up when I had hemorrhagic pancreatitis. Basically, my pancreas took my liver hostage, named itself new warlord of my abdomen, and ordered every other major organ be reshaped to look more like him. It was an awful standoff, and even though I lived, I don’t know that there was a clear “winner.” Fixing my pancreas and all my other insides from that incident and the two other cases of pancreatitis I’ve had since then have also contributed to the “weird” look. The best worst description came from the surgeon who laparoscopically removed my gallbladder through my belly button in hopes of luring my pancreas into a more logistically sound location. She said my insides look like stalactites and stalagmites. She’s good people–she went down to Haiti and temporarily donated her hands and brain for much needed surgeries in the first weeks of the horrible mess in Port-au-Prince–and so I, for some reason, trust her silly description. Come to think of it, though, there are a lot of good people who I wouldn’t say “he’s a great guy, so I believe in his quirky way of describing my insides,” and, when you think about it, she could have donated those body parts permanently, but she chose to bring them home with her. What a typical American liberal elitist move. Hmn.
In the meantime, today was the worst day of this unidentified stomach problem. It’s been going back and forth between feeling slightly better and slightly worse, but today definitely ended worse (not definitely slightly worse–forget that “slightly” all together). I described it, if the pain continues getting worse at the same rate, as passing pain scale level number nine tomorrow. Since the whole system was redefined specifically for me (by me) I should explain. Basically, the standard pain scale asks people to identify their pain on a standard one to ten scale. I did not feel that this adequately left me a way to explain the pain of, say, hemorrhagic pancreatitis and all the things surrounding it, like emergency four hour awake surgery, as compared to, let’s see, how about… a major head wound.
(Sorry, if I explained before; I’m in lots of pain just from yawning, and am on a couple of different narcotics.)
I found that even when I was feeling very ill and found myself in a tremendous amount of pain, I would say I was at a five on the pain scale, because I knew whatever I had didn’t even compare to hemorrhagic pancreatitis. This just confused everyone. So I introduced a pain scale that still goes from one to ten, except it involves exponents. Aside from my original attack of pancreatitis, I have only ever described one other thing being as bad as a nine. That was the third time I had pancreatitis; I was adamant that it was a 9.5. That was before I left my body to zombie around without me for ten days in June 2009, and I just knew that I had some bad pancreatitis going on. I tried to explain the whole exponential pain scale in the ED (ER), and what 9.5 meant, as compared to, say, 9. But whatever happened as a result of me saying that sent me on a trip through the cosmos of which I have no memory. That 9.5 has been called “acute chronic pancreatitis,” “acute non hemorrhagic pancreatitis,” and by a steadily growing group of scientists, “Larry.”
I’ve since realized that if I was searching for an easier way to quickly explain how bad my pain is, having to explain the whole curved graph, and 10 representing some sort of “infinite pain” was the wrong way to do it. In fact, I think I’ve made the whole situation harder, especially for me, because math is one of those things I never really understood, and I realize now that exponents probably aren’t even what I thought they were (they involve a toaster oven and how fast plastic takes to burn in it, right?). Also, no one else has adopted this scale, including the doctors and nurses who should really probably be able to understand how good or 10 I feel. Oh well.
My stomach hurts a lot now. The pain has really spread. My head hurts a hell of a lot, and everything else, not satisfied with waiting on the sidelines this time, has entered the “ouch” game, where everything hurts! I’m scheduled to have an endoscopy next week, which seems quite a long time to wait as I judge my pain going from 9.0433299 to 9.04333. Hopefully that test, which I will supposedly be fully under for, will definitely have a chance to maybe finally reveal some answers. Until then, I’ve got pain leaking from my ears. I’m selling it at quite reasonable rates, so make sure to stop by before next week for one of these crazy, crazy deals! Someone said it was as if I was giving my left arm away! Yes… almost. This pain won’t last forever, so remember to come with lots and lots of pre-signed blank checks!
for yesterday. The Incredibly Improbable Statistic Of The Day