Tag Archives: Health

Health

Catching Up

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Well. It’s been a while, hasn’t it? I wasn’t even going to look up how long it’s been, but the WordPress app front loads the list of recent posts and, well, the last time I posted here was in February. And even that post was late. So I guess 2022 hasn’t been a good year for posting. Hasn’t been a good year for a lot of other people either, but at least this one small thing I can fix…

In actual fact, I did have plans for posting here multiple times across the year, but distractions and overthinking combined make for a high hurdle. Something of a theme for the year, maybe? Anyhow, here’s a bundle of thoughts that maybe should have been posts of their own but didn’t make it.

Health

May as well get this out of the way first, seeing as part of the reason for getting back into posting was to throw out updates on my health situation. So, the good news is that the cancer is staying put for the moment—my medicine is doing its job nicely and long may it continue to do so. Covid hasn’t been quite so friendly, and it’s taken two shots at me this year, the latter of which left me with a cough that’s been hard to shake in the face of a cold snap and the array of sniffles and maladies doing the rounds at the moment. Still, Christmas is coming, and that’s a season of rest, right?

Work

Not a huge amount to say on this front, apart from the fact that I’m getting towards two years in the games industry and still enjoying it. Actual details will be thin on the ground, due to the NDA-heavy nature of the industry, but we actually had some RTE cameras in the studio recently, and it was nice to see some info creep out into the wild. With any luck, there will be some exciting news on the projects I’ve been working on revealed to the world.

Writing

Not for the first time, NaNoWriMo was a bust. Honestly, being stuck at home as much as I’ve been this year isn’t conducive to creative writing, at least for me. What creative juices have been flowing have been directed towards work instead. Hopefully something to balance a little better in 2023.

Travel

I travelled! Not just once, but twice. First time in March, a long weekend in London, to catch the Stonehenge exhibit in the British Museum (proof that the BM can do pretty well in the absence of imperially abducted goods) and do a metric ton of walking across a city I love but hadn’t been to in about ten years. Then, towards the end of the year, I took a somewhat chaotic trip across Switzerland, Germany, and Brussels. My travelling partner came down with Covid (I dodged it, somehow), but we took in new cities and met old friends, and I got to travel by rail and climb to the top of Cologne Cathedral, eleven years after I arrived in town too late to gain access. Again, here’s hoping that 2023 has some new travel adventures in store.

From below ground level to the base of the tall spire. With only a few pauses to catch my breath.

Movies

I didn’t get to the cinema much this year, mostly out of a desire to avoid Covid. And there are still several movies that came out this year that I really want to watch, not least The Banshees of Inisherin. Still, I did see a few. Black Panther: Wakanda Forever was disappointing, at least on my first and only watch. Chadwick Boseman’s absence was felt and the gap wasn’t entirely filled, even with multiple actors taking their shots at it. In this, it felt as disjointed as its Marvel stablemate, Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness. Which at least had the advantage of multiversal capering and Sam Raimi’s imaginative visuals to keep things fun. Lastly, there was See How They Run, which started strong with Saoirse Ronan and Sam Rockwell’s double act (Ronan in particular is a deadpan delight) but never quite committed to the bit and limped to a flat finish.

TV

If movies were something of a mixed bag for me in 2022, TV offered a lot. Especially when it came to large-scale fantasy productions. Amazon’s The Rings of Power threw huge amounts of money at the screen to variable results, but despite a few charming performances it was sunk by the fact that its setting, massively truncated in time and space, had little to no internal coherence. Game of Thrones prequel House of the Dragon fared a lot better by keeping its focus on the machinations of family and regal politics and trusting the audience to follow along with its time jumps. Its success can be seen in just how hard the climax of the series hit. Lastly, there was the long (as in decades) awaited adaption of Neil Gaiman’s The Sandman, which proved admirably faithful to the books, under Gaiman’s stewardship. Perhaps even to a fault, as the series more or less climaxed in episode 5, had its strongest episode in the subsequent one, then picked up some loose plot threads to round out the season. Now that it’s been confirmed for a second season pickup, hopefully some of these pacing issues can be smoothed out.

Other Media

Loads to talk about here, but this is already dragging on a bit, so I’ll do a drive by on everything.

Comics: Kieron Gillen has been one of my favourite writers for years, and he got his moment in the sun this year with the Judgement Day crossover, in which he got to put all of the Marvel toys in play and run them through an existential wringer. Well worth catching, especially if you read his Eternals series (a vital prequel and great series in its own right).

Games: Best game of the year is a recent entrant. Pentiment sees the player take the role of an artist in medieval Germany and attempt to solve a murder that rocks a small mountain community and the nearby abbey. It’s meticulously researched and beautifully presented, but it’s not heavy going at all, and I introduced a non-gamer friend to it, much to their enjoyment. Worth a spin if you have any interest in murder mysteries, the social politics of imperial Germany, or illustrated manuscripts.

Roleplaying Games: Keeping up a regular gaming habit in the face of social distancing wasn’t easy, but now that those restrictions have eased a bit, there has been some in-person gaming too. Most of that has been plain old D&D (with Solasta providing a nice toolset for online D&D adventures) but I’m hoping for more in 2023: a return to Call of Cthulhu, the new Pendragon release from Chaosium, and the Kickstarter delivery of DIE, based on Kieron Gillen’s comic of the same name, which promises some psychologically intense gaming if I can find people willing to play it.

And that’s…

…it. Too little too late as far as 2022 goes, but here’s hoping I’ll be a little more active in 2023. Plans are afoot to be a little more organised at least. I have all of the tools at my disposal. I just have to use them and develop good habits that have fallen into abeyance. Merry Christmas and Happy New Year to you all.

Health

What You Need to Do

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When I was younger, newspapers were fond of stories of people who triumphed in the face of adversity. You know the kind of thing: “I lost my job but invented a hairdryer and now I’m a millionaire” or “I learned to play the piano while going through chemotherapy and now I’m playing Carnegie Hall!” Reading these full-page stories, usually accompanied by photos of the people in question, smiling beatifically, the younger me tended to agree. Taking a traumatic event and turning it into something positive; that was good, right? That was what you ought to do.

Then, when I was nineteen, I got cancer myself. And despite having ambitions of being a writer, I spent most of my eight months of chemotherapy glued to the couch, exhausted, constipated, or both. No writing got done, and for a long time afterwards I viewed those eight months as wasted time. I could have done more with all that free time. I should have done more.

Fifteen or so years later, I had another life upheaval and reacted differently. I lost a long-term job while I was still reeling from a painful breakup. No physical illness to add to my troubles, thankfully, but a similar form of mental adversity. This time I took a step back and thought about what I needed to do. I travelled and made plans and shifted my life in a direction that I hoped would make me a better, happier person. I wasn’t suddenly in a different place, just moving in a different direction.

So I handled the second crisis much better, didn’t I? Got lemons and made lemonade, whereas previously I’d just sat on my couch and done nothing, right? That’s how I saw things. It took me a long time to realise that I was wrong.

It’s not just that the circumstances were different. In the first case I was still a student, reliant on my parents and suffering from both a disease that had taken a huge amount out of me for a year and a half and a treatment that wasn’t much less gruelling. In the second I was in receipt of a decent payoff from my old employer and more emotionally mature, despite any relationship trauma. What I could do in the two circumstances was worlds apart.

It’s also that my needs were very different. In the first case I was ill, and getting better was the priority. Putting pressure on myself to write wasn’t helpful, whereas resting, spending time with family and friends, and enjoying being in one of the most beautiful parts of Northern Ireland certainly was. In the second, I’d been uncomfortably static for a long time and needed to shake things up. Travelling gave me time to think and learn from new experiences, and I followed it up by going back to college and trying out several new jobs, putting a new shape on the next decade.

In both cases, I did what I needed to, which was the best thing for myself in the circumstances I was in.

Right now, we’re sharing similarly traumatic circumstances. Covid-19 has circled the globe and everything feels like it’s on shutdown. Circumstance and carelessness have ballooned a crisis into a potential catastrophe that people all across the world are working, sometimes at risk to their lives and health, to forestall. For the rest of us, we don’t know what the next few weeks or months are going to bring, but most are spending a lot of time at home, our normal habits and activities disrupted.

Amidst all of this, I’ve seen more than a few suggestions that people should take advantage of this disruption to tackle the mountains that loom in the back of our heads. To finally write that novel, learn how to play that instrument or speak that language, take up baking or knitting, or get fit and cut out the junk food. My sympathy is far more with those who respond to such calls with a simple, “Eh, no.”

Don’t get me wrong: if the need’s been in you to do something and you have the time and energy, go for it. But take it from someone who knows: don’t beat yourself up for not doing the things you think you ought to be doing. Figure out what you need instead. And if you’re struggling to cope with the day-to-day news, isolated from your loved ones, or even spending three hours a day trying to persuade those loved ones to go to sleep, then what you need might be to curl up on your couch with Netflix or Disney+ and the relaxing beverage of your choice.

As for myself, I’m doing what I can. I’m isolated enough that I’ve taken to speaking to myself just to hear a voice, but that doesn’t make me any more crazy than I already was. I’m getting as much exercise as I need, experimenting with baking and cooking because I enjoy the experience and can eat the results, reading more than I have in ages, and catching up on a load of TV shows. I haven’t done much writing, and there are three unpainted miniatures on the table in front of me most days, but they’ll still be there if I need them.

So do what you need to do, however active or inactive that might be. If you achieve something new, that’s awesome. If you come out the other end of this in a good mental and physical place, that’s even better. I’ll meet you there, and maybe we’ll swap stories.

Cancer Update

A brief and positive update. Last Thursday I had a CT scan, which turned into a bit of a trial, though thankfully not a lengthy one. This morning I got the results: The cancer is responding to the treatments and the tumours that the doctors are watching have all shrunk. So that’s nothing but good news. More details will come, but for now let’s be thankful for medical science and living in a country with a mostly functional health service. I’ll keep taking the pills and staying as far away from Covid-19 as I can. One life-threatening illness is as much as I want to cope with right now.

Health, Politics

Life in a time of Covid

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Well, that escalated quickly, didn’t it?

Or maybe it didn’t. We’ve been watching the news from China, and then from Italy, for the past couple of weeks now. We’ve seen epidemics spread before, and this is one we had plenty of time to see coming. (I cancelled a trip to Northern Italy a couple of weekends ago, before there was any news of cases here in Ireland. Maybe I missed my chance to be the local patient zero.)

So now we’re all in quasi-lockdown in Ireland. Or at least we are south of the border. Large gatherings are banned, shops have been sporadically denuded of a selection of items (flour, eggs, toilet-paper — sounds like the start of rag week in college), and those of us who can work from home have been strongly encouraged to do so. Which is a bit of a pain for me, as I have a Lego International Space Station set due to be delivered to work, and if there’s a classy way to go mad in isolation, it’s fiddling with a massive set of Lego.

Betrayed by timing once again…

Regardless of my Lego woes, there are bigger problems out there. Even at this first level of disruption, we’re about to find out exactly how robust the systems of our society are, and how much capacity we have to absorb periods of stress. I suspect we’re in for a rude awakening. Plenty of people now work freelance or on contract without support, and when their employers start grinding their gears in the absence of income, that pain is going to get passed along.

I’m not in that situation at the moment, thankfully, and there seems to be an initial burst of solidarity here, which is good to see, but how long that survives is the key question. Schools have shut months before summer was due, putting pressure on parents who may be struggling to make ends meet as it is, and our social services are already overworked. As someone with recent experience of the HSE, I can say that I’m glad my next appointment isn’t until the end of the month. At least I’m not adding more to what they have to deal with.

Ireland, of course, is sandwiched between the U.K. on one side and the U.S. on the other. In the former, a laissez-faire government is currently at war with businesses and organisations that aren’t quite as sanguine about the prospects of selective exposure working out when so little is known about how Covid-19 spreads. On the other, you have a government rotting from the head down and desperate to pass off responsibility for the problem to someone — anyone — while dragging their heels on doing anything. In comparison, Ireland looks like an oasis of calm, albeit one where two weeks ago people were up in arms over the fact that we didn’t have a government, and we still don’t.

We’re stuck this way for the rest of the month at least, which is going to mute the St. Patricks Day celebrations somewhat. Not that I mind — I haven’t been to the parade in years — but it’ll be a bit strange to have empty streets on a March 17th and a bit nice not to have hordes of drunken revellers infesting Temple Bar and staggering home at all hours. So let no one say that Covid-19 has brought nothing good.

After that, it’ll be back to the new normal. Properly leveraging all those many means of communication that we now have to keep touch with our family and friends. Getting out for regular walks so our muscles and brains don’t atrophy from being inside for so long. Making serious progress on your Netflix or Amazon Prime backlog, or your unread bookpile if you’re more erudite than I’ve become myself. And in the absence of my Lego set, I’ll see if I can finally get around to painting those three miniatures that have been sitting on my table for months.

For now, I hope you’re doing well in the midst of all of this, wherever you are, and that Covid-19 is brought under control to the point where our medical services can cope with a minimum of disruption. And as a last bit of entertainment, I offer a little Tom Lehrer (apologies for the lack of embedding — I’ll figure that problem out later):

Cancer Update

Not a huge amount of news to share here. I’m aware that once again I haven’t updated in a little while (I had another post planned, but circumstances distracted me) but truth be told, I continue to take the pills and am still waiting on the CT scan at the start of April to find out what sort of work they’ve been doing. In the meantime, I’m doing my best not to become a total couch potato and remaining aware of my breathing (a little short right now but otherwise clear). Obviously, getting sick when my lungs are already below maximum capacity would lead to complications, so I’m going to avoid that too. For now though, life goes on and so do we all.

Health

Middle-Aged Mutant Ninja* Writer

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(Not actually a ninja. Though I do have a sword. And a bow and arrow. And I like dressing in black. So maybe there is a little bit of ninja in there.)

A lot of the experience of cancer is waiting. Waiting for a scan and then the results of the scan. Waiting for the next treatment, and then for that treatment to take effect. Waiting to see if the cancer has progressed, stalled, or retreated. Waiting across the span of weeks and months.

It might all be a bit annoying if I wasn’t used to being patient. Possibly more patient than I ought to be sometimes, but that’s a topic for another post.

When I was first diagnosed with lung cancer, some of the tumour samples were sent off for a trio of extra tests. These tests were looking for a specific mutation, ALK, that might open up other treatment options. Normally the chance of finding this mutation is pretty small, but I was already an edge case as a relatively youthful non-smoker, and the doctors figured my odds of having it were higher than normal. So they crossed their fingers and sent the samples off.

And then we waited.

Waited long enough that I had to make a decision on whether or not to start the standard chemotherapy course or wait for the test results. Deciding that punching the cancer in the face right away was the better option, I decided to go ahead, and the results of that you can read about in a preceding post.

The second course of chemo was due for yesterday, but it didn’t go ahead. Why not? Because the long-awaited test results came through, and they came through positive. Or mostly so—two out of three tests returned positive, and the third was ambivalent. My tumour was one of the rare ones with the ALK mutation, and that meant that a drug called Alectinib was now the preferred treatment option.

Why preferred? Well, beyond prospects for better results, Alectinib is delivered in pill form. Instead of going to the hospital every three weeks to have cytotoxic drugs dripped into my bloodstream, I get to go to the pharmacy and collect a box of pills, which I’ll take twice a day, with breakfast and dinner. Side effects too should be much milder, though everything to do with this kind of treatment is described in terms of percentages and I’ll have to wait and see what my percentile dice roll turns up.

As for treatment prospects, I’m still doing the reading and not getting too ahead of myself, but Alectinib does seem to offer a much better outlook than chemotherapy. The numbers for lung cancer are … not good, as a rule. The numbers for Alectinib specifically look better, with the caveat that this is a very new treatment. So new that they talk about two-year outcomes instead of five-year outcomes.

But I’m not getting too far ahead of myself on that score. This is probably the best news that I’ve had since my initial diagnosis, and if nothing else it means that I can live a much less restricted life than I was worried I might have to. One pill, twice a day, with fewer side effects than chemo? That’s something to be glad about.

Of course, this means that I’ll also be back to work before too long, and living something resembling a normal life. There’ll still be things to write about here, and I’m hardly going to be forgetting that I have cancer. There will be plenty of tests and results to wait for. I’m also giving serious thought to deleting my Facebook account, as I’ve already made the decision not to link any more posts from here to there.

For now though, I’ll take the win. More to see and more to do as the year comes in, but for now I’m in good form and hope you are too. Thanks for reading.

Health

Cancer Capitalism

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Another new year. A new decade, in fact. (The “starting on a 1” thing doesn’t count for decades. We’re in the ‘20s now.) And what have we learned?

<Takes a quick look around at the current state of the world.>

Not a damn lot, apparently. Going to have to do something about that.

It looks like it’s going to be an interesting year and decade. For most of the world, this is because there are people in positions of power trying to kill them in pursuit of endless profit growth. In my case, that too, but also because there are parts of my body doing their best to kill me in pursuit of endless growth.

Fun metaphor, isn’t it? Oddly, I don’t ascribe malice to either. In the case of cancer, anthropomorphising my tumour isn’t a step I’m willing to take just yet. It’s just a bunch of cells with faulty instructions, following those instructions to the letter and completely ignorant of the fact that their ultimate success leads to their ultimate destruction. If I’m not around any more, no more growth for them.

Malignant, yes. Malicious, no.

Corporate bosses wedded to the desire for continual growth are more culpable but still trapped by the same faulty instructions. As someone who had a job for years reading business magazines, the constant desire for growth always struck me as odd. If a company failed to increase its growth rate year on year, or worse yet failed to grow, the market would “punish” it by hammering its share price.

Why? Because shareholders demand a return on their investment, and merely remaining profitable year on year offered no great returns. Companies had to grow like crazy (hi Amazon!), promise future crazy growth (hi Amazon!), or dominate their market to such an extent that they grabbed all the profit therein (hi Amazon, Apple, Google, etc.!). Growth, growth, growth. Didn’t matter how it happened, as long as it was legal-ish, and as regulations on markets have tumbled and frayed around the world, the definition of legal-ish has gotten wider and wider.

The people at the helms of these growth machines are only doing what they’ve been taught to do. Maximise profit and growth and minimise loss, whether in the form of taxes, salaries, or competition. The results we see all around. People struggling to make ends meet on jobs that once would have supported most or all of a family. Social safety nets so threadbare that more and more people fall through and end up on the streets. Ecologically damaging industrial machines that keep churning because the alternative is to drop a few share points. More and more of the world’s “wealth” concentrated in the hands of fewer and fewer people. And for wealth, read “power,” because that’s how the world has been arranged since mankind got over its self-consciousness and started living in groups.

Malignant? Yes. Malicious? Not in most cases, I think. But vicious? Definitely. Vicious to anyone caught in the teeth of the growth machine.

Capitalism as cancer then? But what about all the good it brings? Well, capitalism, unlike cancer, does have some benefits. It’s a remarkably efficient engine for generating wealth and enhancing productivity. But leave it unregulated and it might as well be cancerous. Growth for the sake of more growth, without regard to the well-being of the host body. When your concerns are wholly focused on the quarterly shareholder report, you’re not paying attention to the long term.

If there’s a solution, it’s that nasty word: regulation. Regulation in deed, as well as word. And that’s going to be hard. The first country to clamp down on unrestricted corporate growth is going to see an exodus of the big boys. (Ireland is particularly vulnerable in this regard, having made itself a cosy home for them in the past few decades.) Large-scale action, in the form of nations implementing new regulations together, might halt the growth of capitalism and the erosion of the society it’s built on, but the alliances of nation states that might make such things feasible are looking shaky these days. (Someone, somewhere, is very much enjoying Brexit and the Trumpocracy and all the international mistrust that’s spreading as a result.)

But, you know, it’s a new year. And only two days in, we ought to remain at least a little optimistic about how things are going to turn out. Hopeful that we’re in the midst of late-stage capitalism, not end-stage capitalism. Hopeful that some global medical team more knowledgable than me has the correct therapy to halt the ever-spreading gospel of growth. Because most of us have enough on our plates to deal with, without worrying that the whole system is going to collapse within our lifetimes.

Cancer Update: Since I know a few people are keeping an eye on this blog for reasons other than my anti-capitalist pessimism, a little personal update. The first chemotherapy session was two weeks ago, and things have gone pretty well so far. Side effects were minimal and gone within a week. I didn’t even need to use any of my anti-nausea medication (though the vile-tasting laxative drink did prove immediately useful). Next dose of chemotherapy is in a week, and if things turn out the same then I might be back at work before too long. As for any results from the treatment, it’s way too early for those, but maybe (just maybe) my cough seems a little less harsh. Even if that’s purely psychosomatic, I’ll take it. And, as before, I’m still fully active and enjoyed the Christmas and New Year period, so no complaints on that front either.

Most of all, I want to thank everyone who’s reached out on hearing about my diagnosis. It has been one of the nicest parts of this whole experience. Which is not saying a lot, I know, so just know that each and every one of you are deeply appreciated.