Easy trip (for a change), though I’m dreading my return through SFO on Friday due the continuing runway closure there. Got in early enough to spend some time at the office, then off to dinner with
To bed with me now. Morning walkies, some Endurance time if I can manage it, then a day at the office, Omaha style.
Posted: 6:47 pm Mon June 15 2009 | Comments(0) |
Two hours of writing, 4,400 new words, to 10,100 manuscript total so far. This will almost certainly be overlength, but then, all my first drafts are.
“Do you dream with Endurance in Seliu?”
He gave me an odd look. “There are no words, I am already telling you.”
Somehow this became very important to me. “But where are you in dreams? In a field under our hot sun?” My father’s paddies. “Or on the cold streets of this northern city?”
Almost helplessly, he replied, “I am with the god.”
Having come far too close to Blackblood for the comfort of any sane person, and been called by the Lily Goddess, I could take his meaning. Gods happened in a place where the everyday world was an incidental detail. As if one could see and hear everything. Which, while possible for the divine, was very difficult for the merely human. As an ant might view the world seen from a person’s eyes.
“I understand,” I told him.
Posted: 5:53 pm Mon June 15 2009 | Comments(0) |
More on Death of a Starship — From MonkeyBrain’s web site.
This weekend’s cancer updates:
A Visit with the Oncologist: [ jlake.com | LiveJournal ]
The Edges in My Head: [ jlake.com | LiveJournal ]
Revolutionary Medicine — About the possible ongoing changes in healthcare.
?otD: Where in the world is Jay Lake?
Posted: 3:55 am Mon June 15 2009 | Comments(1) |
I promised an update on the emotional journey of the past week or two, and so, here it is.
First of all, the big secret which should surprise no one. I am not brave. I am not fearless. I am an arrant, craven coward who loves my life beyond reason. The measured, thoughtful responses you’ve seen from about my cancer have been real, but they haven’t been the whole story by a long shot.
I spent over an hour last night in
No matter what this is, it’s very early stage. Even at the worst case, my personal numbers are much better than the medical statistics. As my mother said, I’ve never been at the center of the bell curve in my life, why would I start now? And we’re a long way from worst case. The lung spot is just as likely to be a scar. The lymph activity could have been a transient infection. The liver is the most difficult to explain away, but it’s also not fuly confirmed.
If I come out of this clean, I’m going to be embarrassed as hell. But embarrassed beats the hot snot out of surgery and chemo. By the same token, surgery and chemo beat the burning bile out of continuing down the cancer road untreated.
So where have I been? In some dark places and some very bright ones. My fundamental nature is quite positive. I can go pretty ‘splat’, but I always bounce back up. I cope by looking over the darkest edges, then walking back from there. These edges are pretty damned dark. But the love of my family and friends, of
Maybe this will come out clean now, all turn into a combination of scanning errors and the mighty power of coincidence. I hope for that, but I can’t afford to think it, to plan for it. That’s not where the main chance lies right now. I have to look ahead and sort through what will happen next.
In other words, a short and winding road with a lot of weird emotional weather, but some very bright lights and brilliant hearts serving as my guide.
Posted: 7:17 pm Sun June 14 2009 | Comments(8) |
For those playing along with the home game version of “Where’s Jay”, the next few weeks have slipped into startling complexity. In brief:
6/15-6/19 Omaha, NE
6/19-6/25 Portland, OR
6/25-6/28 Iron Springs, WA (with
6/28-6/29 Portland, OR
6/29-7/5 San Francisco, CA (with
7/5-7/12 Ocean Park, WA (with
And, of course, working two hours every day on Endurance as I go along.
I’m currently scheduled to go to Omaha 7/13-7/17, then back to San Francisco 7/17-7/21, but that’s all a bit iffy depending on where medical stuff goes. In that vein, I have cancer-related appointments of various kinds on 6/19, 6/22, 6/25 and 6/30. By early July we’ll hopefully have a much better idea of what comes next on the cancer front, which in turn will govern whether I make it to WorldCon and so forth.
Posted: 7:12 pm Sun June 14 2009 | Comments(0) |
This one’s a self portrait
As usual, more at the Flickr set.
Posted: 7:05 pm Sun June 14 2009 | Comments(0) |
2 hours, 3,000 new words to 5,700 words. Spent the first few minutes untangled a tyro error on POV in yesterday’s work which
This morning whilst 
Onward I go. Binge writing possible on this draft depending on how pressed for time the cancer makes me feel, but I’m aiming for the 2,500 words/2 hours per day mark for the time being. It’s a hell of a deadline to have hanging over one’s head.
Very few of the graves were marked to tell who lay within. This struck me as odd — most cemeteries I’d seen or read about seemed to feature little biographies of their inmates, as if knowing the year a baby had died would make the child more real to a passerby of a later generation.
But they were decorated in a manner that had clearly once been lavish. Jewels and metal chasings had vanished uncounted generations past. Carvings remained. Details. Images in tile, or painted underneath a sheltering roof. That a person was buried here at all stated, “I am wealthy” in the ways of this city long before the rise of the Dukes. These graves dated from the time of Kingdoms, and some from the Years of Brass prior to that.
Without words, they told stories. This one featured small batwinged children, like demon messengers, with a hint of torment on each tiny, windworn face that called to mind a life spent on the margins of dark magics and wicked philosophies. That one’s pilasters were bundles of sheaves, wrapped in vines, as if the dead had been overlords of some great swathe of farms. So each told its silent story, some worn to threadbare memories, others still shouting from beyond death’s veil.
Posted: 12:51 pm Sun June 14 2009 | Comments(0) |
Of garbage, seagulls, civic pride, and nerdview — Language Log on the processes of culture and language. We have this problem in sf/f sometimes, I think.
Nails — Game? Art? Internet artifact? (Thanks to
Biz Stone answers your Twitter questions
?otD: What’s the name of that Journey song? You know, the one that sounds like…um…all the other Journey songs.
Posted: 10:07 am Sun June 14 2009 | Comments(0) |
Had another doctor’s appointment Friday,
The oncologist had a fabulous Marcus Welby thing going on — very understated, comforting, comfortable. This contrasts with my surgeon’s rather earnest bluntness, which I think I prefer. But the facts still remain about the irregularities in the lymph, the lung spot, and the liver spots. She doesn’t seem very concerned about the lung, focusing on the alternate explanations for the lung spot.
Unlike my surgeon, the oncologist is not fully confident that we’re going to chemo (and she is the oncologist), but she also didn’t have any alternate theories to cancer for what was going on in my liver. She said, well maybe it’s just a structural feature. I pointed out it wasn’t on last year’s scans, and she acknowledged that.
We also discussed chemo at some length. I would have FOLFOX in two three month courses with a break in the middle for imaging. I’d also be on regular imaging as a long term followup, for some years at a minimum. There’s another drug in the mix, Avastin, that impairs the growth of blood cells in tumors. ETA:
The oncologist did say that any appearance of cancer after a surgical resection triggers chemo, that we don’t have to prove it’s in the lymph via tumor detection to do that.
She very strongly prefers to wait and re-image in order to look at growth on the liver and lungs, and re-check the lymph. She felt four months might be better, but two months would be acceptable. I asked what other tests would be appropriate, and this is where the one significant new element emerged. She said an MRI would allow us to evaluate the liver differently, and might reveal new information either confirming cancer or making it less likely.
So I have an MRI the morning of on Thursday, 6/25 before
We also discussed the timing and advisability of the liver re-sectioning, but she didn’t shed any new light on that. It all comes down to resolving the ambiguities about what’s going on in my liver, and to a lesser degree, my lung.
So, except for the MRI and some details about chemo, no real news. Like I said, different spin, but we’re still on the watch-and-wait plan for a little while longer.
I’ll try to write a catch up note tomorrow on my emotional journey of late.
Posted: 7:24 pm Sat June 13 2009 | Comments(3) |
Occasionally one has something resembling a normal day.
It’s kind of like having a normal life. Friends, writing,
Posted: 5:21 pm Sat June 13 2009 | Comments(0) |