Please go help Elizabeth

Alright all 3 of you kind readers – my friend Elizabeth Greyber is running the Nike’s Women Marathon this weekend as part of Team in Training in honor of my battle with cancer. Please go to her page and give a little so she can reach her goal.

Thanks and “Mind you, moose bites can be pretty nasty”

Unclogging and letting go

For those of you playing along on the home game… This coming friday is my last chemo. I have much to tell and share about the whole experience  but today I want to focus on the piece I am chewing on. It will probably come off preachy but screw it – it’s my blog. You don’t like it go elsewhere.

So I had a great labor day weekend – the Queen was back East visiting her folks, I fought bronchitis with the help of a z-pack, some great friends who helped with the kids, and some extra sleep. Got a ton-o-laundry done, restarted the compost pile, went on a calm and relaxing walk with my kids up the river by Sanborn park, saw some crayfish, and watched Bolt. Overall a win. Oh yeah, I also shaved off my eyebrows because they were going mangy due to chemo induced hair loss.

The loss of my eyebrows allowed Felix to give me these brand spanking new ones. And as I was going on the walk today I realized I couldn’t really keep up with the kids and that I had to use hiking poles to keep my balance. I am anemic and due to neuropathy I can’t really control the muscles around my knees as much. When we went to pick up Fay (the eldest) we were playing some baseball in the backyard and I was trying to walk backwards in the yard and tripped on…nothing. I just fell over backwards because my leg just gave out. And the final piece of this all is that I most definitely am suffering from chemo brain. I don’t have good recall anymore, have a hard time finding words (which some people consider a blessing), and have some serious difficulty keeping my train of thought as long as Dory.

I am fatigued in general, just plain old worn down. I find myself napping everyday and still not feeling rested. My face looks sallow and tired. People who haven’t figured out that I have cancer ask if I am feeling ok because I look really worn out.

So in the end – I am beat down. Not giving up or “refusing to fight” – just plain beat down. I go between being a small child – with no hair, needing to nap, and cranky – and what I feel it must be like to get older for some people – no hair, needing to nap, taking a handful of pills at least twice a day, losing my body and my mental faculty.

I am not sad, I am through that. I am now just starting to lean into it. I ask myself what does it feel like to embrace this state I have entered. I don’t want to stay here, but while I am in this place what can I learn.

Cancer and life in general has taken me to a place where I have almost nothing left that I thought about how the world works. For that matter I have had to let go of so much and yet still/because of it I am  someplace I never thought I would be.  I had started letting go of control a while ago, even before the cancer – but this has just brought it farther along (BTW, I know it could go much farther, so in no way will you hear me say I have “hit bottom”).

Some people theorize that one of the reasons you get cancer is because you have emotions and feelings that are stuck and repressed. They stay in you and eat into you and turn into something nasty and deadly.

I now believe this.

I have gone and gotten myself unclogged physically, the chemo has destroyed most if not all of the tumors. How do I go about and do it spiritually and psychologically. How do I go about changing my life to be true to me and who I am. No more clogs. What assumptions and baggage do I have that I need to jettison.  Given my strong desire to seek approval from others what I have done to myself. All the unquestioned ideas and assumptions I  inherited and chose to carry forward – what has it done to me. Which parts do I keep and which parts are no longer me nor were they ever.

This pain and experience is GOOD, thats right I said it – GOOD. You know what – Cancer doesn’t suck anymore than a whole lot of unfortunate shit that can happen in your life. It is just our fucked up society doesn’t see cancer as something you can blame the victim for (except for those dirty cigarrette smokers).  Whoa serious digression potential here. The point I want to make today is stop “fighting” this and that, because it is part of life. Sure don’t die – I am all for avoiding dying if you can, but get on with loving and living.

I am along for the ride on this one and I am excited to see where I end up. It may not be some place “happy” – life doesn’t give those kind of guarantees – but it can be good.  I am not sure where this all goes except one place it doesn’t – and that is back.

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.

A bachelor for a week

So the smoking hot wife (aka The Queen) and the F1s are back on the East Coast visiting family for the week. I go out to join them next week but until then I am leading the bacheloresque life style. This is the first time I have been alone in the house for more than a day since my first child was born many moons ago. I have had plenty of alone time on business trips but never just time alone in my neighborhood in my house. Yesterday the pup and I took a beautiful hike into the Santa Cruz mountains.

But the point of this post is that I have had more time with Hulu than I care to admit and here is my verdict…

Serenity Firefly = suckage (sure to get flames on that one)

Chuck = Fun though a bit too predictable. Besides, being the sentimental one it bugs me that Chuck and Sarah don’t just hook up and get on with it. I hate this we both love each other yet are both too scared to do anything about it – bleh.

A hanukah gift to all my GIS homies – how do you do on the SFGate geography quiz?

http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2008/12/18/TR041480K3.DTL

To all my Heeb tribe members – a great Kachunkah number from the brother of Sasha Baron Cohen (Borat). I love the song I am not so down with the portrayal of the chasidim – though they do know how to party

Update – I removed the embedded video because it was removed by request – here is the link to the song.

http://newlinerecords.com/hanukkah/video.html

Any other Hulu or Musical recommendations from the loyal listeners?

Where the frick have I been

Greetings all 5 of you who are still following me. I got caught up in the “I really need to write this post and it is important so I better put a lot of effort into it but then I never find the time” trap. So here is the best I can with the time I want to devote to this post.

1. I am no longer the developer evangelist for deCarta. Actually I haven’t been since the end of August. I left not because I didn’t believe the company but it was that my old firm Jones & Stokes (now ICF\Jones & Stokes) made me an offer I couldn’t refuse. I loved the work I was doing at deCarta and I loved the product. I helped finish up the mobile API and then helped launch it at Navteq Connections but since them I just a cheerleader on the side.  Most of all though, I really loved the people I worked with (I love you man). They have a great team of people and they have a great product and I am still a big fan. They gave me the space to become more of the person I want to be and I am forever thankful to them and especially my boss Marc.

2. As I stated above I now work, again, for ICF/Jones & Stokes. I am now the Applied Technology Practice Leader and Senior Conservation Biologist and I work out of the San Jose office.  In this new role I work on technology projects, help organize the tech savy people at ICF/J&S, and help to set vision for where our practice goes with technology. We have experience in Microsoft technologies, ESRI, Java, Linux, and FOSS4G. I am grooving on the new work I do and my ability to help set vision in the company. I have been traveling to our regional offices and interacting with the Mothership back in Fairfax.

I enjoy doing a lot of things and so I don’t expect work to fulfill all my career desires nor do I want to pigeon myself into one industry or type of position. I love being a tech evangelist, I love working with tech, I love working on ecological issues, and who knows where life will take me. All I know if I like what I do now and I look forward to whatever is around the bend.

3. I have not been writing for basically that last year for several reasons. There have been personal issues I have been struggling through but I think things are definitely on the upturn. I say “I think” because I have learned to live more in the now and because I want to keep working on the relationships which are important to me. Saying things are good gives a sense of being settled and I am not sure life is ever that way (except when you are dead).

I have also not written much because twitter and facebook have sucked up my writing energy. I have found that tweeting definitely decreases my desire to blog. I am really not that interesting and so most of what I need to say can be done in 140 letters or less. Facebook serves as my social networking outlet and so therefore the blog has suffered.

All of this is to say – I am still here, doing fun stuff and really enjoying life in a way I haven’t in a long long time. I would like to tweet less and blog more on some of the cool stuff  I am doing and some of my thoughts in general. No promises but if you stick around I will try to be more of a presence here.

The music quote of the day comes from the Barenaked Ladies CD, “snacktime” ( a must buy, especially if you have kids) – “When I make mistakes I use a lot of salt ’cause salt makes mistakes taste great”

Chag Semeach

Happy Chanukah everyone! Remember this is a story of the few triumphing over the mighty and not by force but by spirit!

Some life advice for you

If some day you have 3 kids and 2 dogs and you are moving to San Jose and school starts on August 28th but the house isn’t ready until sept 1st so you decide you will all stay in a hotel room and you are going to work and clean the old house – it will be exhausting…

Sad ending and exciting beginnings

As of July 23rd I am no longer gainfully employed by Jones & Stokes. It was a long process that led to this event. The most important driving factor in this chain of events was that my families’ allergies were terrible in the Sacramento valley. Moving from this area couldn’t happen through Jones & Stokes and so I had to look outside.

First question from some people is going to be “How could you leave ecology after all the glowing posts you gave”. I loved the chances I got to do field work and to talk conservation biology shop with my colleagues. The problem was that I was too expensive for my level of expertise in NorCal flora and fauna. While I am good at field work and know a few things about deserts and birds – most of my ecological experience is as a landscape ecologist. My billable rate was too high to really make it feasible for me to get out in the field that often. I would suppose this is actually close to academia, where the higher up the food chain you go the less time you get to spend outside. So in the end I didn’t get to do that much field work.

Some of you may want to know if I left because I didn’t like Jones & Stokes. This is an easy question for me – I can say without hesitation say that I think J&S is one of the best natural resources consulting firms out there. I really liked almost everyone I worked with. They generally treat their employees with respect. The work is, on balance, interesting and ecology in the real world. When I started looking outside J&S I did not even think about working for a different consulting firm.

I think once I realized I couldn’t stay with J&S I started to think what I did and did not like about being in the consulting world. The biggest problem for me was the whole billable hours thang. While my goal was not that high there were several consequences of the system I did not like.

The first problem was that no matter how many hours you worked if you didn’t meet your billable goals it doesn’t matter. So if I was working 60 hours a week trying to roll out a new service or investigating something that had to be done to take our GIS practice to another level, it wouldn’t count. I mean it would count in that my supervisor would note the extra effort, but it was all secondary to making your billable hours goal.

Second, to insure that I had enough billable hours I had to take on more than I could do, thereby insuring that I would have enough hours if a project got halted or changed direction. This was an uncomfortable position for me to be in and I am not sure I could have grown used to it over time. I don’t think any of these things were particular to Jones & Stokes but are more a fact of the consulting business.

The next logical question in the series is – what am I doing now and for that I will tell the name of the company and my position title. I am now the technology evangelist for deCarta in sunny San Jose, CA. There will be a posting in the near future talking about why I chose deCarta, what I will be doing, and my goals. On of the plus side (or the downside for you if you don’t like my writing) is that I will be blogging now as part of my “official” duties. I am really psyched about my new position and I want my next post do it justice. Then again – putting the weight of doing justice on a post is a sure fire way to make it months before it gets written.

I would write more but I am finding it hard to find time to get the thoughts together. We still don’t have a place to live in San Jose or Oakland/Berkley. This lack of a very basic foundation in life – along with trying to get up to speed in a new position, is consuming most of my mental energy. If you know of a nice 3+ bdrm, 2+ bath house that takes dogs in either the willow glen/cambrian area in San Jose or in a nice safe neigborhood in Oakland or Berkely please let me know.

On this Memorial Day

This post is to help remember my uncle Aaron Lieb Rosenstreich (of blessed memory), 187th Airborne, killed in Vietnam on May 11th, 1969. A gifted craftsman, artist, and Peace Corp volunteer – beloved friend, brother, son, and uncle. Links 1 and 2

Help Stop the Hairsanity – for a good cause

You, yes you, can help battle childrens’ cancer. I have been growing my hair for at least the last two months, and on my birthday, I will shave it all at a St. Baldricks event. The idea is that you pledge money and I shave my head. With a donation to me you get two feel-goods. One, you help fight childrens’ cancer and two, you spare the world from having to witness my jewfro. Please go to my page (or my team’s page) and donate now. For those of you attending devcon you will get to see me looking like Brian Goldin (aka Mr. Clean). Please for the lofty goal of getting rid of childhood cancer and for the lesser goal of stopping my wife from having to avert her eyes, pledge, pledge, pledge…