Time for the two week update – more fun with cancer and chemo

I am sad and tired. First ground rule to this post – do not write “keep it up” or “you gotta be positive” or any of that nonsense in my comments. I know all of that already and you telling me that either makes me feel inadequate or annoyed. So let’s save us all the trouble and skip those kind of comments.

It has been a little over 2 weeks since my chemo and I thought I would fill everyone in and write a little to perhaps alleviate some of my sadness.

I HATE PREDNISONE! There I said it. That has been the worst part of the actual treatment part of the chemo medicines. 5 days at 100 miligrams a day and then an abrupt stop really stinks. Saturday night I did not sleep and the other nights I slept no more than 5 hours a night. When I am awake it feels like being a field mouse on crank. You have a ton of energy and all of it is for naught since you can’t really focus on anything for more than 10 seconds at a time. I found myself feeling anxious even with an increase in happy pills. It was interesting to take the dose with breakfast and start to feel the rush come on and then feel it start to all wear off at about 10pm at night. The crash after stopping was pretty sucky as well. My legs were twitchy, I had terrible mood swings, my face started breaking out…

That being said – I feel incredibly lucky that this is what I have to deal with. I am complaining here but the background to it is that I feel incredibly fortunate. The eldest daughter and I went to a Team in Training event last Saturday – I am an honoree this season. When some of the honorees told their stories you couldn’t help but cry. I knew I was fortunate before but there were new depths of appreciation. I am not currently suffereing from heart failure due to the chemo, I am not being put in a medical coma because there would be no way for me to deal with the pain – it could be so much worse.

Back to our story… I felt generally good the first week – even went to a meeting at work in San Diego. This last week has been harder. I am not sure if it is coming off the prednisone or if it is the killing of my blood cells (an intended consequence of my chemo) but I feel drained. And it is not the kind of drained that is helped by a nap, though I have been doing that. It is more this lack of energy and being just plain wasted. I have been able to work and go about my day but it just feels harder.

A second body blow came when I started suffering from alopecia (a fun way to say hair loss). At first it started in my nether regions when I was showering. Now don’t all you porn studios call at once, I am a bit occupied now with my cancer killing and loving my family.  Then yesterday I noticed that if I pulled on my beard and head hairs they would just come out. I knew this was coming and I told really care about it from a looks perspective. I have always told people that I hate shaving and that I would undergo electrolysis if it would really alleviate the need to shave. But this is a very real physical manifestation of my chemo and the cancer. I have been used to having hair on my head. For a large part of my life barbers would comment on my how thick my hair was and I would call it a weed and tell them to use a mower. It has not been as thick of late with a bald spot on the back and my widow’s peak, which my children love tracing with their finger. Never the less it is hard to have this happen to my body. Again I am fortunate that I am neither young nor a woman where there is much more societal value on hair – my heart goes out to them. Still, it is hard.

Another physical manifestation this week was grating parmesean cheese for the kids to put on their pasta. I nicked my thumb and it bled, which nicks tend to do. The difference this time is that it bled just a bit more and for longer than I expected. The chemo I am taking basically stops your bone marrow from producing new blood cells for a while so I will start to dip in the number of platelets for a while. Unfortunately for me this means my Pro hockey as well as UFC career have to go on hold for a while since I am not allowed to engage in activities that can cause bruises and bleeding.

The other hard thing that happened today is that my children caught a cold. In a non-cancer house this is really no big deal and I like tending to my sick children. It has a very fatherly feel to being able to protect and heal your children. But since I am near my nadir, which is cancer speak for when my blood counts are low, I have to be very careful about getting sick. A fever over 100.5, sore throat, and a long list of other symptoms become an immeadiate call to the Dr. Today we, the cp pack, had to try to figure out how to make that work. I was feeling sick myself and so nervous about what was happening to me, but at the same time I had to someone tell the eldest and the artiste that I could not really be near them today and had to spend most of the day in my cave room. It made me feel bad to tell my kids not to kiss me or hold my hand. I know I had to do it but it still feels terrible.

Perhaps my nadir in blood cells is matching my mood.

On the good side, we had wonderful friends over for shabbat dinner last night, the nausea was not a big deal, I worked the last two weeks, my friends have been amazing (Dave B sent me kung fu hustle, one of the best movies ever; Naomi knit me an awesome hat; I got flowers from MJ, I have received a ton-o-emails, twitters, phone calls and other signs of love), my family has been loving and wonderful, I got an appt with the integrative oncology unit at the osher medical center, my tumors under my arm have definitely shrunk for now, and I am still waking up each morning!

This week I have my blood drawn on thurs. to check my blood counts and other various signs. I see my nurse practitioner to talk about how things are going. I think I am going discuss prednisone with her and then also some more about my slow metabolizing liver.

Time to turn it in for the night…

I need to share a little boy story tonight. So I am in bed feeling kinda sick, avoiding the girls with the colds, and generally feeling sad. The little boy comes in to share the joy of listening to the Shrek soundtrack playing on his Deigo CD player. He bounces on the bed for a while and then notices daddy is not feeling so well. So he stops listening and repeats a move I have done to him many times. He starts to rub between my eyes and down my nose with his little fingers. Such a sweet and gentle touch. I close my eyes and relax. Hooray for him and bring a soft moment to an otherwise relatively difficult day.

Why isn’t this file in the ESRI geoprocessing help- NAD to WGS geographic projections

The files listed here should be included in the geoprocessing help for geog. transformations. So if you are out there doing a projection from NAD27 to WGS84 and you don’t know which of the 11 or so different transformations to pick please come back to this link to find the link to the help page that links to the word doc that explains why use which transformations. Got it? Good

http://support.esri.com/index.cfm?fa=knowledgebase.techArticles.articleShow&d=21327

1 down, 5 to go – Cancer, I break wind in your general direction

Ok before I start this post some warnings

1. My pottty mouth is ramping up so if you are offended by those types of words please be careful or stop reading now

2. I am going to be really frank about my cancer  – I have it and by writing about it here it is another small way I can take charge. I am going to post a bunch of the info on my disease and how I experience it. I hope sharing this information can make it easier for other people to kick its ass and not feel so alone. Some of this comes from inspiration from Dooce and Dad Gone Mad who have been both out there talking about depression and anxiety. I admire their courage and their willingness to be open about their experience, it has has really helped me. In the same way maybe one or two people can benefit from what I have to say.

4. I AM NOT A MEDICAL EXPERT – do not take my advice in the place of your Dr, RN, or PA – again DO NOT

5. If you want to follow along with the home game I am tweeting my chemos (Camino Medical rocks for having wifi – though I wish it didn’t time out every hour). Oh yeah and a shout out to all my homies in Camino medical oncology and infusion facility – they are frickin awesome. I felt cared for, listened to, they kept joking with me. I can not recommend them highly enough!

6. I will try to respond to comments but please don’t be upset if I don’t. I am riding this wave and I imagine some times will be better than others. My priorities right now are 1) beating cancer to a pulp 2) loving and protecting my family 3) living by my commitments at work 4) making the world a better place.

6. I am amped up right now on 3 cell killing drugs, a monoclonal antibody, a butt load of steriods, enough benadryl to knock out an elephant (saw it once on Wild Kingdom), and my happy pills. Please excuse the writing style if it is not working for you. This update will not be a thought piece but more of just catching people up with where I am…

With that out of the way – here we go, buckle your chin strap and hang on.

So last week I finished up all my testing, my blood work, my PET scan, my CAT scan, and my Bone Marrow work.  I will post my pictures and reports later in the week when I pick up the CD. It came back that I am stage 2, which means I have two lymphatic areas that have cancer but they are on the same side of the diaphragm. Thanks everyone for txt’ing in and picking Stage 1 but I think AT&T messed with the results and so I am stage 2.

Based on this I am still really curable. As a matter of fact my oncologist, the excellent Dr. Wong, said “You have a really curable cancer don’t fuck it up”. He said this in making sure i don’t dilly dally with getting the chemo burn on. I really trust Dr. Wong and felt so good about how he is doing, that i have chosen not to get a second opinion right now.

I pushed really hard to get my chemo started as soon as possible and work was incredibly flexible about moving meetings around, allowing me to begin today (friday). I am taking 6 rounds of CHOP-R, once every 3 weeks. If you want to find me in 3 weeks – I will be sitting in a lazy-boy pumping in those great cancer killing poisions. I will scan my drug regime and put it up later next week as well so you can find out the acronyms. The cool one is the R part which is not a chemical drug but actually a monoclonal antibody that targets the CD20  receptor on my cancer cells – better living through biochemisty!

As the day approached for my chemo I was really starting to get sad. In retrospect I really let the fear of my chemo take hold of my thoughts. In the end, for me the chemo was relatively easy to have administered. I had a slight allergic reaction to the C drug which is why I had more benadryl and the steroids, but it was very managable. But it was really very easy to have the drugs put it. I sat there today and tweeted and did some work (hurray for billable hours) and watch geoGeekTV with Dave B.

Lesson from today: Don’t let your fears work you up – we, as humans, are generally much better at spinning fears down dark paths that are false. I think this also helps to explain why more communcation is better than less. The vaccuum of information is usually filled with peoples’ fears.

I am experience some of the nausea symptoms now but I took some anti-nausea drugs, ate some ginger ice cream, and went for a walk and I am feeling a bit better. I am sad that I missed the Shavuot Torah study last night and the festivals today.

I went into the infusion center @ 8:30 AM and left at 5:00 PM – it has been a long long day that I hope (Baruch Hashem) you never have to experience. I am finally starting to get sleepy. I want to thank TheQueen for being so awesome at my side today and riding the wave with me, my kids for being so good and having all the other parents say they were a joy to have over, the excellent staff at Camino, and all you out there in ether land. Getting the tweets, txts, facebook updates, and email just made me plain joyful. I love getting the good vibes and the sillier or happier the note the better.

Tomorrow shall try to be a day when I post pictures of what I look like on day 1 of my smashing of cancer. Here I am a 40 year old, out of shape but soon to be working on it, European and Iranian Jew who defeats cancer and rides off into the sunset with his lovely family and friends at his side. Let’s see where this goes….

PET scan done (aka Cancer has a sugar addiction)

Today I had the PET scan. The basic idea is that I fast and then they inject me with radioactive sugar. I take a nap for 45 minutes, wake up, lie on a big spinning magnet for a half hour and then they take some images. Since cancer cells LOVE sugar they tend to stand out in the photos. I got to sneak a peak and I didn’t see any bright areas except around my armpit – so if I read it right that would put me in stage 1 or late stage 2. What I was really glad to see was no glowing liver or spleen. Another cool part was since the brain is constantly chewing carbs my brain was all lit up as was my bladder as my body worked to rid me of the isotopes.

The one drawback, I am mildly radioactive for the next 6 hours. So, for example, if I had a long drive with someone I would have to sit in the back of the car. On the other hand there is a chance I could have been mutated and now I am super hero!

and a musical selection in honor of todays events.

So here it is – I have cancer

More specifically – I have B-Cell Lymphoma.

Met my oncologist on Thursday last week and he, Dr. Derrick Wong, is awesome. He tolerates me well, extracts bone marrow in record time and has a great sense of humor. For the record, having bone marrow taken out hurts more than skinning your knee but less that root canal with semi-effective anesthesia or less than Thai massage when it hits a really owwwie spot. The Queen told me I should be glad I did not see the needles and bone sample things they used. I have the distinct feeling I am going to end up being like cartman http://www.southparkstudios.com/episodes/103511 – don’t watch if you don’t like southpark

He told me that my disease is incredibly treatable, no matter what stage I come back as, and the treatments are cookbook. I go to get a PET and CAT scan this week and then probably begin chemo the week after. He also said on the scale of 1 = woosy chemo and 10 = chuck-Norris-world-of-hurt chemo, mine would be a 3. If I am stage 1, it is 3 courses of chemo and 1 round of radiation – any other stage and its 6 rounds of chemo. I find out my staging after all the test results are in. If you need to pray and hope for something I would ask for 1) spontaneous remission 2) barring that let me be stage 1.

We told the kids that Daddy has cancer but that there are lots of types of cancer. Baruch Hashem, mine is very treatable. I will have 4-6 months of taking medicine and then I will be all better. Oldest asked if the medicine would make me crazy and I asked her how would she be able to tell. Middle wanted to know what color my lymph node was and what color the medicine would be. Youngest said ok and wanted to go back inside so we could play Wii.

I have spoken to many people about my disease now but it still hasn’t really sunk in – I don’t feel sick yet I have this disease in me that, if left untreated, would probably kill me in a year or so. Given all I have read, all I have heard from my friends, all I have heard from DRs, talking to other survivors, and everyones love and support I am extremely upbeat. I plan on being sick for several months and then getting back on with my life. I plan on trying to work through this whole time period. I feel extremely fortunate that this is “all” I have to deal with – it could have been so much worse.

For most of the time I am happy, upbeat, and positive. For those other times it’s not something a little nap and some nice medications can’t take care of.  I am loving all the jokes and joy people are sending my way. We can all move on from sorry now and move on to kicking ass – except when I need to really milk the sympathy a bit.

I plan on looking into team in training, so I can finally get good at riding a bike. I could use some advice on DSi versus PSP (hand-held game consoles). I need something to do during my day long chemo sessions and I am totally parlaying this into getting a handheld game console. I tried to work it for a PS3 but didn’t get very far on that one and there was no movement on a 40” flat screen tv for the Wii.

Please understand if I don’t respond to comments here right away – I am busy giving my kids good daddy time, dealing with testing and paperwork, and trying to stay sane. I will try my best but no promises…

On that note you can expect some posts focusing on cancer here for a bit. I am already cooking up a diatribe on how we as a society have come to poison ourselves.

The CP-Pack rocks Open Street Map (OSM)

So the kids, some of their friends, and I did the recent OSM street mapping party for San Jose.

We had a phenomenal  time – I highly recommend taking your kids if one of the parties comes to your neighborhood. You can discuss crowd-sourcing, GPS units, mapping, landmarks, and all sorts of fun hiking around. The CloudMade staff were awesome and basically my kids got one on one tutorials from the staff and each child got their own GPS unit.

So now my kids edits will live in OSM forever. All the fountains, landmarks, memorials, footpaths that end in fountains, museums, and public toilets (need to change styles to see it) are due to my kids!!!!! How frickin cool is that. And the great part is that my kids can download the data again and use it for whatever they wish.

http://maps.cloudmade.com/?lat=37.337664&lng=-121.892087&zoom=17&styleId=1045

Promise - they were really having fun

Schedule for LinuxFest NW is up

Hey all – if you were planning on attending LinuxFest NW my presentation is on Saturday afternoon. The whole two days are free and there looks to be some great talks. If you are in the area you should come on by.

Oh yeah and I will be giving one of the 4 hour workshops on the first day of GeoWeb 2009. I am bummed that Mansour will be giving his workshop at the same time as me since I now expect 2 of the original 5 people to show up for my workshop. The other reason it bums me out is because I really wanted to go to his session.

I know James will be there but who else from the GIS posse is planning on attending?

I am not going to where but I am going to WhereCamp. Are there any other events people are really looking forward to attending?

VSLive09 – SQL Server 2008 for developers

Leonard Lobel is the presenter – He is a doing a good job showing demos and covering  just the right amount of details in slides. Striking a good balance between new features and basic understanding. Talks a bit fast, so sometimes I fall behind.

Got in late. SQL Server 2008 studio has some very nice features

Table defined types, table valued paramter (TVP) gives you the ability to define a variable which is actual a whole table (like a temp table) with a schema defined.  They are stored tempdb (so a bit slower than CTE or table variable) but it can be indexed. Use case is something like an order table because you can flatten the schema for the header and order items. Instead of going round trip for each piece you can create a table with one call. Demo time

Very very nice! Quick and easy to get results and much less chat across the wire with a client.

Once you pass it – it is read only once you pass it down the stack. THere is no ALTER TABLE… AS TYPE so you need to drop it as well as the stored procedures

Next Topic – MERGE

Four statements in one

• select
• insert
• update
• delete

Operates on a join but you didn’t need to know about it

Start using it now – 100% compat with existing business logic, such as triggers

OUTPUT is for getting psuedo-tables after an operation
OUTPUT $action, inserted.*, deleted.*;

Demo time – he is showing how to do replication and it is really tight and interesting to watch.  Give me more kool-aid

He does a nice demo for updating data and it looks really good – just too much to follow and he is talking a bit too fast.

Next – GROUP BY

Look at with Roll up and CUBE – frickin awesome great for summarization – produces sum for all possible combinations

new is GROUPING SETS – basically does it just for the category you ask for

SQL Server does Cubes right out of the box.

GROUPING helps to deal with distinguising between Nulls and All possible values rolled up

To get this from ORM you would need to use a view or something like that. We then had a short detour on when you might use TSQL vs ORM. He says doing reporting like this might be a place where you might want to use TSQL but he understands the conlict there.

BIG BENEFIT TO VSLive – IT IS NOT MS Conference so the presenters are not as kool-aid driven, much more frank conversation and discussion of pitfalls

New Date and Time variable

• Date
• Time
• datetime2
• datetimeoffset

use these instead of

• datetime
• smalldatetime

Some more about writing code and insulation between layer

He likes DataSets unless you need to serialize them. He thinks they are good for most people and don’t think you really need ORM. DataSets are not slower than DataReaders

He believes developers should only query against stored procedures – no access directly to the tables.  For numerous reasons he then delimits the reasons – wow that is bit harsh but interesting to think about. He argues that with a where clause in LINQ, is that you pull back all the data and then filter on the client and why would you want to do that.

On to LINQ

LINQ is really a way to deal with collections to datasource and vice versa in a standard language. Trying to get rid of all these For loops where you process something to get a Collection of data objects.

On to LINQ to DataSet – look in System.Data.DataSetExtensions assembly

He says if you are starting new he says go to Entity framework – it is much more of an ORM mapper

Watching him decorate a Plain Old C# Object (POCO) with LINQ attributes and then doing really cool things. This is actually pretty neat stuff. As a person who doesn’t usually get into performance issues because of low transaction numbers, I am going to mostly go down this route.

He concludes morning session on stating – LINQ is going to be with us for a while and you better dig in. Some providers are better than other but you better learn it.

More to come after lunch!!! THis is a great session

VSLive – Building RESTful services using WCF 3.5

Jon Flanders found at www.rest-ful.net or www.pluralsight.com – vibrant speaker. He wrote RESTful.NET for O’reilly. He actually is a great speaker.

Hey Sean, he called it an architectural style – does he get correctness points for that.

Gives a short history of REST vs SOAP/WS* and now an introduction so I am tuning out again until he comes to how to do this with WCF. He is doing a good job talking about why REST is better.

VS2008 .NET3.5 SP1

Much fewer attributes to define the service. Just create a service and then create methods to respond to messages.  Since there probably no needs for multiple implementations of the service you don’t need to use IService -> Service, just do the service. You need a WebGet annotation – with a UriTemplate = to the uri that you want to use to get this method called.

You do need a SVC file – a text file with the service definition for IIS to see the service,  also needs a factory that is in his demo.

Fiddler is a good tool for doing REST debugging if you don’t want to use Firebug – made by MS.

Caching is a huge benefit for REST – especially with static data.  Glad to hear Silverlight support JSON/ WCF has support for JSON – AJAX enabled WCF service from new file.

Easy to do with feeds with as well – showing how to create an Atom feed -built in helper methods.

There is a REST starter kit on codeplex.

GREAT SESSION – highly reccomend as a speaker and does a good job talking to .NET developers about why use REST.

VSLive – WCF a whirl wind introductio

Rob Green is the presenter

Available at www.mcwtech.com/2009/vslive/sf

WCF allows you to expose the same service through many protocols – not just SOAP over HTTP (did he just say SOAP, I am about to have listen to WS* stuff)

Looks like from this talk it only knows how to talk using XML as the data type and that you might have to define XSD. I think there is a REST using WCF in a later session. That might be more appropriate for what I want…

So while most of his talk is generic it looks to be focused mostly on WS* stuff. I may skip out and go to the LINQ session though it sounds like Entity Framework is the way to go. Nah stay here for now…

Interesting, Attributed Code seems to be the .NET equivalent to Java  @ annotations.

The WCF test client shows you the XML payloads and the bound data – not bad

If the web service to front your service – delete the generated files and point it instead to the service you make first. Need the slides or demo to figure this stuff out and now I see what Dave B was talking about. There is a lot to remember to get this up and going – then again he is showing WS*.

Alright tuning out and doing work work – pop back in if he stops talking about WS*.

Ok, wacky pack but kinda cool is that you could host one of these services inside excel where one person has the master spreadsheet and everyone else looks to get updates interactively while the spreadsheet is open.

Interesting