Day 167, Happy Birthday Dad

I’ll get to the sundry details of the waning days of chemotherapy, including the fiasco of the flying fork, later on in this post.  First, I wanted to take a moment to remember my dad, who was born 92 years ago yesterday, and share a few notable and amusing things from his life.

Dad liked to fix things around the house and was fearless about it.  The earliest story of this goes way back before I was born, when he was still living with his parents.  It seems his parents bought a new couch, and many people commented how sitting on said couch gave the feeling that you were in danger of sliding off the couch.  One day, while everybody else was away, my dad “fixed” the couch problem by sawing off the back legs.  This did not go over well with his parents.

Dad was drafted at the end of World War 2, and if I remember the story correctly he did his basic training at Fort Devens in Massachusetts.  Like me, he was rather skinny in his younger days (not to imply he inherited said trait from me, rather it was the other way around), and apparently there was much humor in his attempting to march up a hill with a heavy flamethrower on his back.  The war ended while he was in training, but he was still deployed to Germany to be part of the occupation after the war.  His claim to fame there was pissing on Hitler’s grave, which apparently was the thing to do if you were deployed to Germany after the war.

One of dad’s hobbies was target shooting.  He was a lifetime member of the NRA and also a member of the Sikorsky rifle club.  I grew up shooting BB guns and air rifles in a modest target range he set up in the basement.  It was a completely different time.  There was a rifle range in the basement of my elementary school.  I grew up thinking of guns as tools and not weapons.

Dad could do lots of things around the house.  I consider myself somewhat of a  do-it-yourselfer, but I’m just a distant echo of what my dad could do.  When I was a boy and got my first train set, he built a table out of a 4x8 sheet of plywood for what was to become my expanding railroad empire.  What makes this notable is that he did it while his leg was in a cast.

Years later when I got into model airplanes, Dad looked at an advertisement for a field box, made a few measurements, and made an almost exact copy from scratch in his workshop.  While he also tried out model airplanes, after a few crashes he decided model sailboats were more his speed.  He did serve as my pit crew when I briefly dabbled in model airplane competitions, which is another very fond memory of mine.

And finally, my dad had a long and drawn out battle with bladder cancer. Though it never spread, it kept coming back over and over again.  Eventually his bladder was removed entirely, which cured the cancer completely but unfortunately set in motion a sequence of events which led to his death over a decade ago.

Yes, cancer.  Again.  It’s an unfortunate habit of this blog that everything eventually ties back into cancer.  Also unfortunate is I’ve taken the first step in my dad’s cancer footsteps and already had my first bladder procedure.  I don’t give the bladder cancer much mention because in the grand scheme of things, advanced prostate cancer is a much more immediate threat.

Which is saying something.  For years I’ve lived in fear of having inherited my dad’s propensity for bladder cancer.  The thought of regular cystoscopies (or as my uncle recently called it, “the poker up the pecker”) is not very appealing.  The thought of repeated surgical procedures and eventually having a urostomy bag is even worse.  Bladder cancer by itself is enough reason to be obsessive and worried about the future.  That I’ve spent very little time thinking about it over the past several months is quite notable.

I suppose there’s a lesson in there that no matter how fearsome the future possibilities are, they aren’t in the here and now and you always have the option of focusing on something else.  Unfortunately in my case that’s been prostate cancer.  My homework after this blog post to is to consider that perhaps I can focus on something besides prostate cancer for a while now that chemotherapy is winding down.

After a very brief hiatus, I’ve started running again, though with very frequent and prolonged walk breaks.  One of my preferred places to run during the winter is what is now called Devens.  Fort Devens has been downsized since WW2, and large portions of what used to be army base are now dedicated to housing and industrial use.  It’s a great place to run in the winter because the roads are wide and well plowed, so there’s plenty of shoulder to run on without the need to dive into the woods for every passing car.  I did a lot of my marathon training here back in 2011.  And of course, there’s additional sentimental value since my dad did his basic training here.

Getting back to my ongoing recovery from chemotherapy, it’s now two weeks after my last infusion, and yesterday was my last follow-up appointment.  As expected, my blood counts were at their lowest point.  In past cycles they’ve come roaring back in the third week, and there’s no reason to doubt they won’t do the same thing again.  I typically feel like I’m catching a cold this week, which is probably just the immune system coming back online and catching up with any viruses or bacteria that have been trying to move in.

I’m also seeing signs that my brain and nervous system aren’t terribly happy with chemo.  My fingertips have a bit of numbness, and to borrow a description from the internet it feels as if there’s tape on them.

I’ve also been more clumsy than usual, and have dropped countless forks and knives since chemo began.  This has been accompanied by the development of instinctively moving my bare feet out of the way of falling blades and tines, as it would be a rather unpleasant complication to have them land pointy bits first on my foot.  Once I tried to catch a falling fork and only managed to swat it in the general direction of my wife.  Sharing meals with me is more dangerous than you might expect.

My brain also has been having trouble recalling memories.  Yesterday it took longer than it should have to remember the name of my urologist.  I also have trouble with the names of medications I’m taking.  It’s not that I don’t remember, it’s that I can’t find the information in my brain.  My strength as a programmer has been the ability to quickly recall lots of obscure details.  It’s very handy when a customer using an old release reports a bug, as frequently off the top of my head I can say if it was fixed in a subsequent release, or point directly to the small bit of code in thousands of lines of source code that’s likely relevant to the problem.  Thus, it’s quite alarming for me to suddenly draw a blank when asked a question I should know the answer to.

Of course, all of this should resolve itself with time.  After all, if my immune system is at its lowest point right now, it’s reasonable fair to expect that many of the other side effects of chemotherapy are also at their peak.  Right now I’m in a period of sleeping a lot and waiting for things to run their natural course.  There’s also a fair amount of whining and grumbling, as if somehow I can speed up the waiting process.  I’m a patient with little patience.

It’s been quite a week.  I miss my dad terribly, and it’s worse when I remember him as a healthy and capable man.  I’m still dealing with side effects, as expected, but looking forward to going two whole weeks without seeing a doctor of any kind.  I am in nervous anticipation of finally having an extended period of recovery after nearly six months of being abused by surgery, radiation, and chemo.