Chondrosarcoma – ah shit, bob's sick

Let’s start with a simple re-cap here, the cold that has gripped for the last few days is definitely on it’s way out. I’m not sure what caused it to be so intense, but I’m glad it’s almost gone. Could be that the radiation treatments have weakened my system in general,  the cancer itself, I assume weakens it further yet, and of course I’ve been in and out of hospitals and centers amongst hundreds of sick people, on a daily basis … so I’m not really surprised that I caught something. Anyway, it’s mostly over and I’m feeling almost back to whatever normal will be for me.

I lost another five – six pounds, due to the cold and living on ginger-ale and water, but I’m confident that I’ll be putting that back on within a week or so. The doc recognized this fact today, and seemed ok, with that as an answer, as to why the rapid loss of poundage.

This past week, we also had a catastrophic failure of one of our servers on Scifillian (which is the reason this blog was down for a day or two), but all seems to be functioning now. I won’t go into deep detail about it …. But I will say, that you really have to watch the scripts that you allow others to run in their sites. For you programmers out there, you understand what I’m talking about. It doesn’t have to be done intentionally, to create a disaster that brought down dozens of business sites for days. If you’ve sent me an email in the last few days and it bounced, this is the reason why, and I ask that you please resend it. Simply said, you can thank Josh F. for the very fact that you’re even reading this blog tonight. If it weren’t for him lending a quick hand in setting a new server up, I probably would’ve lost a lot of clients, and had a bunch of really pissed off customers. If there’s a computer god award out there, I give it him for this one.

You know, I been thinking about this from time to time, but I’ve never asked any of the doctors at MGH or any place I’ve been for that matter. Nor have I read an acceptable answer anywhere. It keeps crossing my mind as though for some reason, I should have, or need an answer, … or that there is an answer, out there somewhere, and I just haven’t met the right doctor or scientist that can give me a direct, accurate reply. My question is simply, but the answer could be so incredibly complex that it makes proton therapy look like child’s play.

So ahhh, where do these weird, almost unheard of, cancers come from? What are they? … There are a lot of reasons why, someone, me included, would want to know. For instance, I wondered if it came down the line in my family, my mother’s side?, father’s side? I never heard of it, but it wasn’t long ago that they didn’t know 90% of the time what you died from anyway. Maybe it comes from two or even three generations back, maybe it developing right now and starting with me, and it’s in my genetic code, and I’m the idiot passing it on further down the line. Maybe it starts and stops right here with me, you just don’t know.

Here’s a big thought … maybe it’s our life-style … you know, the way we live, the stress of raising families in today’s world. It certainly could be, look at what we have to do to survive these days … you sell your soul to work, so that you can simply feed your kids … it wasn’t always like that.

Here’s another big thought … maybe it’s in our environment! Look at all the crap we live with and use, just go count the plastic containers in your house … and all those cleaning agents, and all the air pollution, water pollution and so on, and so on. Where does it come from?

What made the cells in my body go haywire and start duplicating themselves in a different way … that’s what cancer is. Cells begin to reproduce themselves dramatically different then they were meant too. All of a sudden, something sets them off  kilter, and they begin developing their own blood vessel network that looks like a crazy woman’s quilt and they begin expanding as though they are going to take over your entire body … and they will if you let them.

So what is it? … is it the radiation dissipation  from the test nukes they dropped in the 1950′s when I was just born?,  maybe it was the insecticides they sprayed the streets with when we were kids to keep the mosquitoes at bay, or the stuff they spray on lawns to keep your grass green and fed.

There is so much stuff that is allowed to be used on people, and there hasn’t been nearly enough time or testing that’s gone on to really say “this is safe”, because what they’re really telling us, is that “this is for sale”, not necessarily safe. Granted, I probably buy the crap and use it like everyone else … but have we been sold a “bill of goods” that totally one sided for the safety of business rather then people? Stick that in your pipe and smoke it.

It was only fifty years ago that the government itself was passing out free cigarettes to it’s soldiers in the military … that’s right, encouraging smoking! My father was one of them, he came back from World War 2 with a smoking habit, thanks to Uncle Sam, and therefore all his children smoked … it was OK back then to let your kids smoke. We wouldn’t dream of doing that today. We’re only talking one generation back … it’s incredibly close in time. Of course the tobacco itself wasn’t additive enough, so they also allowed the companies to fill them up with more chemistry then Harry Potter’s workshop and here we are today … everybody’s dying, health care expenses are skyrocketing, and our politicians are sitting back and wondering why? Come on, gimme a break, we’re not that stupid, at least I hope we’re not. They are working on dumbing down America though.

I remember as a kid in the streets of New York, there used to be pretty girls passing out free smokes (cigarettes) in the streets and in the bigger, fancier stores! Just right there, giving them to anyone who wanted them. Didn’t really matter if you were a kid or not. That’s how it was done in my lifetime … and that was probably only 40 years ago.

You can say they aren’t doing any longer, but you know what? … they still are, they’re just doing it in other countries! I shouldn’t go on and on about this stuff because it just gets you pissed off that it could be the reason people are still suffering so much today, and that’s not what this is all about … or is it?

Whatever it is, what I’d really like to know is, have I passed this on to my children, or is it something that’s a one time deal for me only? Do we need to watch our future generations for genetic mutations that may leave our family lines susceptible to such cancers. Are all family lines in such trouble? Everyday I see a lot of people (men, woman, and children) from around the globe (and I mean that, the Proton Center in Boston is servicing people from around the world), with all kinds of cancer and it makes me wonder if it’s always been like this and we simply weren’t aware, or if there is a huge increase in the rarer cancers like this.

I could understand if this cancer came from smoking, or a work/living environment like asbestos … but I don’t think that’s the case here, it’s simply an oddity at this time as far as I know … but I want ask Doc Delaney his opinion on that. He deals and works with this stuff everyday, and sees people with all these odd cancers, both young and old … what’s the story doc?

That’s it for tonight, I promised my dear old friend Lydia R. that I would write a restaurant review, the Boston section, of the world famous Zagat Guide, about one of her friends restaurants that I recently dined at.  Besides, I have a lot of work to catch up on.

The last two days have been crazy! So many things happening on the home front. At the least I can say that my cold is finally clearing, and that I’m begining to feel much better.

The weather here in Nahant has been absolutely beautiful too! One of the nicest Novembers I’ve spent in a long time.

Treatment has been going very well (which I’ll elborate more on in this evening’s post), and besides the cold thing, I’m really starting to feel pretty well.