Here's a little thought I just had. I was lying here in bed with my dog Lola, who is the light of my life, as are most dogs to their people. As I lay here my brain starts wondering to issues of various sorts happening in the world, but then I landed on poverty, and specifically staving or obese children. And then I had a thought.... and this thought seemed logical to me...but I recognized the potential for its unpopularity.

My thought was we love our dogs like they are our children, we would do anything for them, yet we feed them the same boring kibble everyday. Why do we do this? It's healthy! We know what they are eating, we can manage their weight, and it's affordable, and efficient. And most dogs wait at the ready for their bowl of kibble every morning, yup, the same bowl they had last night, and yesterday morning. They even have dog foods that are natural, organic, vegetarian, gluten free, and who knows what else, that are just as regulated, or more than some of the “food” we eat.

So here's where my thoughts led, if you haven't already figured it out... why isn't there a kid kibble? And I don’t count cereal. Something hearty, and substantially nutritious, to be a whole meal. Think of all the starving kids that we could feed if we had a good kibble to give them a couple times a day? And all the 7 year olds, that already have diabetes, and can barely move without wheezing out their breath? How easily we could get that under control.

But it seems absurd, doesn’t it. You can give a kid dog food! That's child abuse! Why, though? We don't consider it dog abuse, and yet we consider our dogs our children?

Some people may argue that humans need variety, it's the spice of life! Well, I think when children are starving, they just want the life part. And do obese kids really need their food to be their entertainment? Maybe if their food wasn't so exciting they wouldn't eat so much, they'd have to entertain themselves in other ways, like oh I don't know... go outside and catch a ball.

Weird Science

As I continue to keep having cancer, modern medicine continues to amaze me with it strange forms of treatment that I would have, otherwise, never become aware of. But it is the world of Radiation Oncology that never disappoints with its "out of this world" ways in which it uses radioactive materials to nuke tumors. You all remember my post about gamma knife, and what a contraption that was. Well aside from that, I have also had whole brain beam radiation, and breast beam radiation. In both of those, they shoot a controlled beam of radiation at a target. Nothing too crazy. With the head I had to wear a plastic mask the attached me to the table, no screws through my skull, like with GK. And with the breast, they tattooed little dots that they aligned with laser sights, and then shot the X-ray beam at me. But my newest treatment takes the cake for being, well, weird.

It's called Interstitial Radiation, and it's where they insert little tubes through the skin directly into the tumor, and then send a radioactive charged wire zipping through the tube into the tumor to give it a blast of RAD from the inside, pretty cool, huh?

Actually, I do find this stuff fascinating. In fact, remember when I told you my doctor approached me about doing a little film project? Well, what she wants is an informative video to show patients what radiation therapy is all about, because for a lot of people, the idea of radiation is, well, scary. I wasn't really sure what I could do to help, but now that I have so much experience in all different forms of radiation treatments, I have some ideas. I want to do a little documentary about the history of radiation, I'm talking Madam Curie and what not. And how we've harnessed something thought to be so volatile, and really learned how to use it to do some pretty amazing stuff in the world of medicine. And since I've gone through all these different treatments I can give it a real personal first hand point of view.

I'm excited to get started on this project, but first I need to finish up with my treatment, which I'm now looking at as research for my film, and as always, continue to hope that there will be no need for me to do anymore "research".

Update: Life

There is a weird feeling of momentum in my life at the moment which I can only describe as a whirlpool or tornado... because I don't know if it is moving up or down, or even what the difference is, it just feels like things in my life are being drawn in and sucked away with amazing force, all the while spinning at such speeds that I'm left disoriented and dizzy. Conversely it also feels like this is all happening in slow motion, which you would think would make it easier to grasp and understand, but really only adds confusion by allowing me time to over analyze everything whipping around my head to the point of overwhelming upset.

Now that I have that thought out, what the hell does it mean? Beside the fact that I need to start seeing a therapist again. Sad story, my therapist, whose time I spent with I valued incredibly, left UC Davis very suddenly, and left me in a state of mental debility that I need to correct asap. Ok, aside from that, back to the whirlpool...

I'm not sure when this churning started, but I want to say it was back in the spring when my health started giving me problems, and my treatments changed. I was is in a great deal of pain, incredibly weak, and as a result became extremely overwrought by school. I spent most of my summer playing catch-up. Not only with school work, but with doctors, and my health regiment that I had been neglecting. On top of that I moved, again.

But I am a notorious procrastinator, and now here I am, at the end of summer, feeling once again, the impending crush of over extension. Now there are parts of this I know I can control, but there is another factor to this momentum, that has not been in my control. My health, I have accepted is ultimately out of my hands. I can make the choice to receive treatment, but how the disease responds to it is something I have no way of anticipating, except to be hopeful and optimistic. Another factor seems to be people, and the insertion and expulsion of people into and from my life. People who have been there in a small part all along are suddenly taking a huge presence, where others whom I thought would be there unquestionably are fading away inexplicably.

Things are also happening creatively, and putting me in the position, once again, of not knowing what direction my life is headed when it comes to career, and even my physical location in the world.

I mentioned that I moved. I am still in Sacramento, and will remain here until I graduate, but I am feeling the restlessness of wanting to be somewhere else. I don't know why it is that I can't sit still. Sacramento seems to have an up and coming cultural city scene that could benefit from a flux of artists, and being part of that could be exciting. But there's this part of me that doesn't want to be a big fish in a small pond (there's this other part of me that is delusional, and thinks that I'm something more than just a guppy in fish bowl.) It's the part that keeps me driven with the belief that I'm meant to do something big. There is also a part of me that thrives from challenge, and has to take the most difficult path that lay ahead.

So far this has been an out pouring of crap from my head that I'm not entirely sure makes any sense, even to me. As a summation, here are some of the things that are going on in my life, without the over analyzing, that I previously applied.

I start back to school this week, and I'm glad, because I think my mind will actually be a lot more clear once it has something occupying its focus again. I just celebrated my 31st b-day, and though I treasure birthdays with a different kind of relish these days, it was low-key, and kinda perfect. One of my gifts was, so incredibly generous, a trip to Paris, which I just booked for December!

There has been a recent out reach from people, much like when I needed help with my animals, and people seemed to step-up outta nowhere to help, but this time it has been to offer me a place to live. I moved into the house of UC Davis faculty members, but have also been offered accommodation from friends, and even a nurse from the Cancer Center, all without any solicitation. Also, one of my doctors has offered me the opportunity to do a film project. The details and general scope of this project are yet to be determined, but just the fact that, out of nowhere, she propositioned me with this opportunity, blew me away.

So anyway, momentum. Things are moving. Good. Bad. New. Uncertain. Exciting. Life, to be continued...

Heads!

I got all this crap in my head swirling around and making me absolutely sick to my stomach, and keeping me from my work. I fully recognize that I have a heightened sense or mortality here compared to your average healthy Joe, and to many my seemingly crazy fears are just undue paranoia and stress, but I can't help it, even with the meds.

I have a sometimes paralyzing fear that something will go drastically wrong on one of my sets, and end up killing a bunch of people, at this point in my career, those people being my colleges colleagues. After seeing all the footage lately of the Sugarland stage collapsing, played over and over on news channels, I am reminded of how potentially dangerous a theater stage can be. Now I don't want any faculty to think that I don't have the utmost trust in their abilities and safety practices, but accidents happen. And an accident on a set I design will, no doubt, leave me feeling tremendously responsible.

It causes another dilemma in my process. It makes me want to "play it safe" in my design, and in taking that route, I often feel innovation is lost, and the art suffers.

To my actor and crew friends, don't let my words scare you. I have this fear with every show I work on , it's just in my nature to worry, and I felt I needed to express it to get past it. So please, carry on with your brave work, and break a leg! (But no more than that, please.)

So yesterday was the dreaded Gamma Knife "surgery". Quick explanation, or at least how I understood it. Step one: put your head in a box. Step two: Take an MRI (of your head) in the box... and then they use the high resolution photos to locate the tumor(s) with x,y,z coordinates on a virtual 3D grid contained by the box. Then they place you in the gamma knife machine, which shoots 201 individual beams of radiation at your head. All of the beams converge at one point in a ball of high intensity radiation. And if it is successful hopefully hitting and annihilating the tumor it is targeted at.
So 6:30am yesterday morning, after forcing myself to stay up all night in hopes of sleeping through the whole procedure, my mom picked me up outside my house, with a Nugget Market croissant (the best.) I arrived at UCDMC Radiology at 7am, I was nervous, and a little delirious from lack of sleep. There was an elderly woman ahead of me, I thought to myself, "Why?" If I was that age, why would I put myself through this? I'm sure it would be a different story if I was that age. They called her back, and 20 minutes later I watched her rolled by in a wheelchair with a frame attached to her head. It didn't look so bad. She didn't look traumatized. I guess the that's one of the things that comes with age. My name was called.


I was taken to what looked like a converted supply closet crammed with a counter of supplies, a wheelchair, two doctors, and a nurse waiting for me. I had applied numbing cream to my forehead a few hours before, and one of the nurses applied some to the back of my head when I arrived. They cleaned off the sites, swabbed on some iodine, and fitted the frame over my head. They then injected me with a numbing agent, which they said would be the worst part (lies). The worst part was next, when they started to crank down on the screw drivers, and I could feel the spinning sensation of threads boring into my skin and then skull. The pressure was unbearable, my stomach immediately turned, and my croissant from earlier was now in my lap. The doctors continued to crank their tools as the nurses cleaned me up. They fitted a plexi box over the frame now attached to my head, and jotted down some measurements. I threw-up one more time (this time I had a catch basin), and it was off to the MRI room. I was loaded into the loud knocking, pinging, vibrating machine. This part was no biggie, I have a MRI every 2-3 months. This one was a little different from those, I was told, in that is it was higher resolution. They warned me of the possibility of finding tumors with these images that they hadn't seen with the others.


I went in for one volatile tumor, or so I thought. After the doctor evaluated the high resolution images, he found eight points he wanted to hit. 6 were old tumors (including the one that prompted this action) that the doctor described as more "plump" than they had been. And then there were 2 small new tumors that these new images picked up (putting my total brain met count to 15, I believe?) So the procedure was going to be long, 4 hours, and remember that sleep I was planning on getting during? Yeah, not gonna happen. Between each 20 to 30 minute blast of radiation, they needed to pull me out change helmets, and move my head to different positions. I did get about an hour of sleep in the few hours while we waited, between getting the MRI, and going to the gamma knife.


All in all, it wasn't that bad. They played CD's and Pandora for me, and in between shots, the docs would come in to make adjustments, and we would talk about the music. The last song Pandora chose for us to enjoy was by Dead Mou5e, or so I was informed by one of the doctors who is a fan. An upbeat electronic piece that sent me out in a much better mood than when I came in.

I was happy to get the frame off. For the rest of the night I was in deep fried vegetative state, but after some food, some painkillers, and some sleep, I feel back to normal. Thanks to all who sent good energy my way, keep it up, I feel it!

Bye Denver

I'm ready to leave Denver. That might sound weird, considering how much I talk about Denver, and how great it is, and how I was so excited for this trip, and this trip was 2 weeks!!, which was nice and long so I'd have plenty of time to see my friends, and on and on. 2 weeks is nice and long. Too long.
I didn't need to be here for the production this long. I didn't need to be out of school this long. And it was too long to keep up the good feelings I had previously felt.
It was great to have so much time with my friends, but over the course of this trip, my mind ran a course of emotions, starting with excited, happy to be "home", to nostalgic, to bittersweet, and now I am sad. I am sad, because I realized this is not my home, it hasn't been my home for a long time.
On all the short trips back to visit, I always felt like I was stopping in, and then I was off again, but I'd be back soon! Like time stood still when I wasn't here. Like it was all just waiting for me to get back. The reason for this being that when I left Denver, it wasn't because I was choosing to leave Denver, it was because I had, too. I had to heal, I couldn't work, and if I wasn't working, there was no purpose for me being here. So there, at the beginning of my new life in Denver, I was ripped out of this city, and left with a scar that never fully healed.
What I came to see this trip, is that everything and everyone here has continued on with their lives. The wound that was left in this city when I was ripped from it has healed up, and it is time I let my wound heal, as well.
In a way, though I'm sad, I'm glad for this closure, and had I not stayed this long, I may not have reached it. Obviously, I hadn't completely put my own life on hold, and I committed myself to being in the Sacramento area for two years for school. I think that once the sadness goes away, I will realize that there is an entire world open to me, and I'm not limited to only what I know or have known.

Phew...

Wow it’s been a while since I’ve written anything. I think the last time I wrote I was about to disappear into the abyss that is grad school. And that I did. Well, I have emerged for air, gasping, and choking, but still alive! First quarter done. And, man it was no joke, I had a design assignment right out the gate, which was an amazing process, and I’m really happy with the outcome. I’m going to enjoy this time off, but I’m looking forward to getting back to it in January. Especially since I’m assisting my professor on a show he’s designing at the Denver Center. Hello friends! Here I come! I’m so excited, I can’t wait to see everyone I miss so so much, but I’m also really excited to be returning in a professional capacity. It’s kind of a bucket list thing, well actually, on my bucket list is to design at the Denver Center, but I would be happy with this if it came down to it.

Speaking of the bucket list, which I know makes some people uncomfortable to hear/read me talk about, but it’s a really great thing! Knowing what I want to really achieve or do or see has been such an adventure! There are some basics on the list, but there are small things that change day to day, there’s no pressure, which some might think there would be. I love it.

Though, there are the few that seem impossible, or difficult is a better word, and others that are completely dependant on chance. So I’m not sure how to go about those. The difficult ones involve money, and me not having any, but really those are less important. I would love to travel abroad, but I can always find enjoyment in local travel, and in my truthful opinion, Nor Cal is the best place on Earth! But the other tricky ones, the ones left up to fate, are a little hard to deal with, and considering the record I have with fate, I’m not very optimistic. I want to fall in love again before I die. It feels like a lot to ask for, but it always seemed so easy when I was younger. Maybe because I wasn’t worried about it, maybe because I was less picky, more confident, more trusting, not sick.

Speaking of being sick, I hardly think of it these days, except for the days like today when I’m sitting in the chemo clinic, in a row of chairs filled with people plugged into IV pumps. Those days bum me out, because it brings me back to reality. Even though there is a strange comfort I’ve come to feel being here, which is a little disturbing in it’s own way. I’m due for scans, so I can’t say exactly where I’m at with things, but I feel good.

I do, however, have to find balance in my new crazy life. I’ve gone from a nearly sedentary life style, sleeping in, taking naps, eating as much as I wanted… to all nighters, running on coffee, I even had a bag of cheetos for breakfast one morning… that I found on the floor of my car as I drove to school. So stress release, sleep, and a healthy diet are very important goals for the near future. Exercise, though, has not been a problem. Over the past few months I’ve lost nearly 20 lbs. I walk everywhere, climb stairs, and walk some more, both around Davis, and in my new hometown of Sacramento.

I’m loving living in Sac, though I’m rarely there. My roommate and I became fast friends, and it has been endless adventures. The drive to Davis isn’t too bad, worse on the way home at night, especially since I can see Sacramento in the distance 5 minutes after leaving Davis, but don’t reach it for another 15. But it’s nice being in a city again, though I am longing for parts of my country life, and am beginning to think about looking into bringing Mia to Davis. Even though, I think she is probably quite happy where she is, I miss her! And My Lola, who comes down and spends time with me, and even goes to school!

So I think that just about covers everything! I’ve actually, surprisingly, have been really inspired to create art, which has always been difficult for me, so I look forward to writing more often, and sharing the other pieces I create, as well!

Tchau!