We all had an impossibly difficult weekend because my Dad was diagnosed with Waldenström’s Macroglobulinemia (WM), a type of non-Hodgkin lymphoma. Going into the weekend, we were expecting a cancer diagnosis on Monday, but were hoping for something else. We didn’t expect anything to develop over the weekend, but nurses told my Mom and Dad to watch out for exhaustion over the weekend… and when it was too much, they went in on Saturday.
The ER folks were surprised a transfusion hadn’t been initiated earlier. Suddenly, on Saturday, we got the diagnosis we thought we’d get on Monday.
Saturday hurt a lot: we had no handle on the prognosis. How long did we have? What should we be doing? Everyone was reading, reading, reading… trying to figure out what to expect. I was frantically pulling Robbins Basic Path off my shelf and refreshing my memory with Wikipedia. From there, I jumped into the primary literature. We were advised to look for clinical trials of drugs, because the disease is so rare and the treatment not necessarily straightforward. Everyone was down, but trying to put a good face on things.
Sunday, the oncologist talked with my parents and sister. He had relatively good news: WM tends to be indolent, and can be managed with chemotherapy (alkylating agents, purine analogs) and Rituximab. It sounds like we can expect relatively normal (though closely monitored) periods punctuated by treatment. Chemo could start as early as this week. The words we cling to: “This is something that can be managed.”
This whole thing has blown in like a blizzard through open windows.
I’m happy I live near my family. I’m relieved that my stupid late-adolescent mind has given way to a mature head that sought to rebuild whatever damage my previous college self caused… before something like this happened. Most of all, I’m thankful for the time.
Friday, I’ll be fitting a gold crown, a single tooth removable partial denture, and a multi-tooth maxillary removable partial denture. So tomorrow, I deliver over $2000 in dentistry.
“Facebook [brings out] our weakest traits as humans. We love to think of ourselves as something we want to be. We trade our true feelings to be included. We want to be popular. We want our taste in music and art to be [valued]. We crave for external success.”
— kunjaan
You probably weren’t wondering how to manage nerds. If you’re Ryan Markoe, you already know how. For anyone left, there’s Managing Nerds:
They know when I reach to pull the hoodie over my head
that I’ve successfully discarded all distractions on the
Planet Earth and am currently communing with the pure
essence of whatever I’m working on.
It’s irrational and
it’s delicious.
A bunch of gems here. Let me re-refer you to the Nerd Handbook, a Very True collection of facts about folks like me. That is, folks who believe the whole system is knowable and seek to understand it.
A shocking report released Monday by the Internal Revenue
Service revealed that more than 65 percent of the money
donated at churches across the world never reaches God.
“Unfortunately, almost half of all collections go toward
administrative expenses such as management, utilities,
and clerical costs,” said Virginia Raeburn, a
spokesperson for the Lord Almighty…
The U.S.-based CEO of one of the world’s largest hedge
funds told me that his firm’s investment committee often
discusses the question of who wins and who loses in
today’s economy. In a recent internal debate, he said, one
of his senior colleagues had argued that the hollowing-out
of the American middle class didn’t really matter. “His
point was that if the transformation of the world economy
lifts four people in China and India out of poverty and
into the middle class, and meanwhile means one American
drops out of the middle class, that’s not such a bad
trade,” the CEO recalled.
