remission?

Dr. Klener worked his magic last week over at Homolka and arranged a PET/CT scan (the fancy nuclear one) for me this past Tuesday. Here are some of the highlights:

All tumors are showing “significant regression”: having shrunk to just over half their former sizes when compared to the last PET/CT in October;

while exhibiting “only minimal glucose consumption” = very little metabolic activity “that would testify to the presence of a viable neoplasm”; but

the pulmonary fibrosis (from the radiation) is worse (and will get worse, before and if it ever gets better) - seen above in the left lung (on right) as that nasty looking star wars starburst pattern of laser blast;

my gall bladder is still ceramic (from the chemotherapy);

and my waistband is, yet again, too tight.

I’m quite pleased with the results, as people generally don’t (actually pretty much never) get better from what I have. I’m not out of the woods yet, but think I found a path. I’m shooting for the ‘all clear’ on my next PET/CT in June, at which point, I will very grudgingly go down as a (very rare) positive statistic promoting the conventional therapies (chemo and radiation) that are the direct cause of all my current health problems. Fingers crossed ;-)

I saw my oncologist yesterday who was thrilled to the point of speechlessness and I’ll try to see my Chinese doctor next week so he can take some of the credit as well. I’ve spent over a year researching and using various therapies and supplements to beat this thing and will expose, expand and expound on each in future posts. I didn’t have the luxury or liberty of any ‘controls’ in this experiment: as time was considered short, I tried a lot of things concurrently, some intensively and others only sporadically.

But I’ll leave you with this ‘very distracting’ picture I took on Wednesday and got yelled at for at GlenGarry Glen Ross. Certain actors, apparently, can be thrown off their game by a little autofocus lamp:

back at it

What an exhausting trip. New York seems like a year ago, but here goes:

A life-long dream of mine had been to see the Harlem Globetrotters® do that thing they do live. Bombarded and teased with advertising throughout my childhood for upcoming performances just a few towns away, I’d always felt a little cheated, left out and behind for missing out.

I don’t feel that way anymore. Thanks to the Garden of Dreams™ people at MSG® (OK, Christine, really), that dream came true much to my personal disillusionment. Not that there was anything wrong with the Trotters, just the ‘garden’ itself was a little fallow:

Remembering with relish the spread for the rodeo, I had starved myself all day in anticipation. This was on pay for tray at the event:

‘Unless them onions is frizzled with gold bullion, or that pork pulled out of the automaker bailout, I ain’t shellin’ out 91 clams for a sammich,’ I chided myself. There was, however, free beer (a lot), of which we indulged (a lot), before somehow waking up in a Dominican restaurant on the Lower East Side covered in salsa.

The rest of my time in NY was parties, packing and saying goodbyes and then off to Berlin, where I had a day of running errands and deutsche domesticity with Travis (doing dishes):

With Travis off to London and me chomping a bit at the bit to return, I took the train back to Prague the following morning and Jiffy picked me up at the station with a couple of beers:

In my absence, my apartment had been redecorated in the minimalist off-white motif of a 19th century hospital ward - not much different from where I’d been a year ago, so I felt right at home at home, as it were. I also lost CNN and the crappy German teleshopping/soft porn channels in favor of the Czech flavors, while the Vietnamese store below my house is, not-so-sadly, not with us anymore. And my cat is having a second childhood – not that any of these things are correlated, necessarily.

Maintaining the momentum from my trip for a few nights, I hit the town and finally hit the wall the first weekend with a flu that left me delirious with fever and otherwise incapacitated until the following Thursday when I went out to Motol for blood tests at 7AM.

I decided to wait around for my oncologist (instead of for the scheduled Monday appointment), so I’d be able to go skiing in the Italian Alps the following (this) week - four months of traveling not having been enough. She gave me the twice over, couldn’t feel any tumors in the nodes, arranged for a CT on March 23rd and a brain MRI on April 20th and told me to call later for the blood results.

When I called later, she told me that my creatinine (a waste product of the muscles) was three times the norm (245μmol/l) and I needed to come back the following morning for more tests and a sonogram, as this represented severe kidney failure. I did some research and it didn’t look good, so I cancelled my trip to Italy, drank lots of water and went to see Monogram with Josh at U Vodarny where I had a lot of beer to kick my kidneys into gear.

I went in at 7 for the tests and then came back at 11:30 for the results and the sonogram. The tests were fine and the sonogram cancelled. I’d managed to lower my creatinine to 63μmol/l – the low end of normal – even without dialysis! She also pointed out that my ‘melanoma marker’, the S-100β protein, which I had no idea they’d been testing for had dropped to .071μg/l from .232μg/l last March - now in the ‘normal’ range! Apparently, anything below .1μg/1 is good. Very good news if you can read between the Greek.

John and Amanda threw me a welcome back party of sorts somehow on Saturday night downstairs at Erra. Nicola, as usual, was in charge of the camera:

We then went over to the latest incarnation of ‘The Zone’ across from my old apartment, now called ‘Bendy’s' of all things:

Which was fun. I'm going to try to see my neurosurgeon tomorrow morning to arrange yet another exam, so I'm off. Sorry this post has been so long in coming (and in length), but it’s been a long few months. Thanks to everyone for their supportive comments on the last post and a special shout out to all those who hosted me on my American tour. I had a great time, but I’m glad to be back, for now at least ;-)

one year since surgery

Karaoke – ‘cantobar’ – on Friday was an absolute bust. Not only didn’t they have ‘everything’ as I had been promised, they didn’t have anything except for... you guessed it, Richard Marx. By the time I had convinced Spoon to duet with me, they had already moved on to trashy teenage ‘gasolina’ disco. We soaked our sorrows at the Red Door and then night-capped at Bar Británico:

On Saturday, we popped by the neighborhood carnaval for all of forty seconds for fear of getting foamed fore dinner:

and a few drinks at a Moroccan restaurant in Palermo:

and then sat the night away at a really cool milonga in Almagro:

We got up early on Sunday for the first time that week to go to the street fair:

before grudgingly leaving for the airport and our respective ways. I nearly froze to death in the exit row (they actually leave the door partially ajar), but managed to get some sleep on the way back. I got into Kennedy around 4AM and had to walk thirty taxi lengths to get to the front of thirty sleeping cab drivers. #1 was also drunk. He drove on the shoulder, weaved in and out of lanes and was furiously honked upat. I made him promise to sleep it off.

Sherman came down for Ethiopian food and some great live soul music on Tuesday. I got a bit of a head cold and am taking it easy. Today is the anniversary of my brain surgery and I dug up this bit I’d written just shortly after the operation:

~

So they came for me around 7 - I still have my hair at this point. I hadn’t slept much the night before (about two hours), but was pretty used to that after a month of very little sleep. I had already lost my mind at this point from it.

They put me on a stretcher and whipped me down to the second floor. The ceiling lights were flashing by just like on TV. I felt OK, strangely - confident, but not exactly relaxed by any stretcher of the imagination.

“Every Where You Go, You Always Take the Weather” or whatever that song is called was playing – c’mon you know the one. The orderly parked me over some complicated-looking device and started plugging things in.

Someone asked if I spoke Czech and someone said “trošku” (a little). I barked out, “Mluvím dost!!” (I speak enough!!) Turned out to be my neurosurgeon who was just making sure that people spoke to me clearly and slowly throughout the procedure. Yet another example of me making an ass of myself in front of my neurosurgeon.

I woke up to the sound of high-pitch drilling to the left side of my head... and to pointless Czech-chick giggle hoohoo elsewhere in the room. After what seemed to be an eternity, I got up the courage to make some noise through shallow breath and clenched teeth, so as not to lose an ear to the laser.

“Prosím? Prosím! Prosím?!” I ventriloquized louder and louder, until the catty chit-chat came to an abrupt end and a nurse put her head in my face. “Vý jste po operaci, Pane Gisondi! Po operaci!” she beamed. I fell back into dreamland only vaguely understanding that the operation was over.

The next thing I saw was my Mother, Mary and Irina in full-on OR scrubs and masks, eyes asmile, mouths liplessly shouting muffled questions and commands in French and Russian for some strange reason. I responded in kind to their seeming satisfaction. I had some numbness in my left foot, but everything else seemed fine.

I saw my neurosurgeon in the hall and thanked him profusely. He looked very upset. I thought it was because of the numbness in my left foot. I told him, “Well, you had to cut something, don’t worry about it.” He looked at me aghast and then just whispered, “Metastaze.” “Whatever, thanks again!” I said. I only found out what he meant several days later...
~
And I wasn’t thinking about where I was going to be a year from then, I was thinking how grateful I was to be alive (and not a vegetable) that day. A lot's happened since, but it’s great to be in Brooklyn after a year, suffering from a little head cold and eating homemade chicken soup at Tim’s.

missing deltas

We all went over to the neighborhood Danish church to see the “Princeton Glee Club” last Tuesday. There’s almost nothing I enjoy more than a bunch of rich white kids singing negro spirituals:

Ann missed her connection in Atlanta (due to Delta’s typical, but still incredible incompetence and complete lack of accountability), so she came a day late into her already tight schedule. I took her to the “Modern Art Museum” just around the corner for starters:

which looked like it hadn’t been open in at least a decade. So we wandered down to Puerto Madero and then to one of my favorite restaurants, Café San Juan, back in San Telmo with my neighbors, Keith and Michael for a great dinner before the Red Door for chili bombs:

On Wednesday we went to MALBA, the actual functional modern art museum, and then across town to La Boca to catch the sunset and have dinner at my new favorite restaurant: Don Carlos “Carlitos” next to the Boca Juniors stadium in La Boca, of all places. And although I don’t usually trust anyone with two first names (let alone three), we put ourselves entirely in the hands of Carlitos himself and let him stuff us with a fifteen course meal, completely of his choosing.

“The lady may have a little room left for a very small dessert,” I said after he had brought us a plate of cheese sorrentinos (delicious fat raviolis) to chase down our steaks. Instead of a single, “very small dessert”, he brought three rather large desserts, which we inhaled shamelessly. The bill, like the menu, was completely arbitrary. We were so drunk on food, literally euphoric, that we would have paid anything. It was an amazing experience and surprisingly reasonable. We unfortunately ate too quickly to take any pictures.

After we aborted trips to both Uruguay and the Paraná Delta (not having much luck with deltas), due to a late start and drizzle yesterday, we settled for a tour of Recoleta Cemetery from a resident guide:

and went to Bellas Artes for some more culture. Our walk to the massive Retiro train / bus station for bargain bags and sneakers and the half hour wait at a cash machine was more than enough of a side trip experience. We’re going to spend the day (what’s left of it) in Palermo and then go to ‘real’ karaoke tonight back in the hood.

Here’s a funny and popular local flea treatment product to round out this post:

year of the ox

We had to watch the inauguration from a Brazilian bar up the street, as the expat dive we had intended to go to was packed to street overflow, due to the Buffalo wings special and huge local TV crew that filled the bar to get the 'American reaction'. This was my favorite part:

And not just for the pleasure of seeing the back-end of a jackass and his last tax-payer-paid helicopter ride, but because of the over 35 degree (that’s like 100 degrees F) spread between our respective temperatures. It was almost worth missing America’s greatest moment in person for the pleasure of watching it in shorts.

On Thursday, Michael and I went down to La Boca to take pictures of brightly-colored shacks:

The next couple nights are a bit of a blur – I’ve been out dancing until 6AM, pretending not to have cancer. What’s funny is that people don’t seem to notice. They can’t even tell! Amazing.

Saturday was to be my night in (the weekends are for amateurs), but my neighbor invited me to a barbecue at his place to meet his girlfriend’s fantastic parents and brother:

I was grilled by the father about all things Czech for much of the evening, until we moved on to the topics of Basque nationalism, the Spanish monarchy, winemaking and New York in the early ‘70s (last time he was there). We laughed and bantered until 4AM. Coty (the lovely girlfriend – Constanza) said that they never stay up past 2, even on Christmas, so the evening was declared an unparalled success!

Yesterday we went from the overcrowded frying pan that is the San Telmo street fair straight into the fire of the ‘Ballio Chino’ for New Year’s:

All the restaurants, as well as the streets and sidewalks, were jam-packed, so we had pizza at a nonstop, but I did manage to find my ‘membranous milk vetch’ in a supermarket, so that’s a relief:

The year of the ox should have interesting implications in the Czech Republic, so please keep me posted. Ann comes to visit on Sunday. Can't wait.

¡che boludos!

The international rodeo championship opened with a spectacular display of ultra-nationalism (although the beer in the VIP lounge was thankfully imported):

typical of most domestic sporting events, but this time compounded with a disturbing and pointless tribute to the US border patrol (who are hiring!), which had all of the Latin American rodeo stars shaking in their cowboy boots:

I couldn’t believe my luck when I scored an exit row all to myself on the plane to Buenos Aires, until I realized that everyone else had three seats to themselves and my armrest was the only one bolted to the floor. I was also right next to a bathroom with a broken door. I did manage a little shuteye on the redeye in between flushings, slammings and the occasional butt in my face.

I arrived to a rather odd, even for here, financial crisis where a one-peso coin now has more value than a two-peso bill and candy is legal tender. Edible money, very Marie Antoinette, but it only goes one-way: not-so-strangely, you can’t pay the bus driver in bonbons.

I stayed with Keith and Michael my first night and we went to a milonga in the hood. On Wednesday, they helped me move into the adjacent apartment from where I'd lived two years ago and just three blocks away from their place:

http://www.giessoprop.com.ar/ver.php?id=224

We had an ad hoc housewarming party when my French neighbor, Julien, popped by as I was airing out the place from its former tenant. I finally got my mobile working after a one-day, one-way battle with the boldface liar of a not-so-interactive voice response system of the not-so-‘es simple’ non-folks over at mobile operator, Claro. My number here is: +54.911.6131.9074.

We went over to Sarah and Diego’s house for delicious full American breakfasts and anti-depressants at 10:30 PM on Thursday:

and then to the karaoke / cantobar at 'Loca Bohemia' that still hadn’t started by 2:30 in the AM. They don’t really get the concept here, which is a good thing, as you get a professional live band instead of the usual Muzak™ rip-off version and cheesy vacation video (no offence, Steve):

Yesterday we hit the San Telmo street fair and tomorrow, we’ll watch the inauguration with other expats at the local version of the Globe. Go Obi-Wan-Obama!

getting outta dodge

After a lovely stay in my mother’s gatored community, Sherman picked me up at Newark ‘Liberty’ Airport and took me back to the Tims’ in Brooklyn. I successfully submitted my visa application to the Czech Consulate on New Year’s Eve and Jon and Annette came up from Baltimore for some shrimp cocktail and gherkins:

I met Patrick and George in Williamsburg for drinks, had dinner at Ru and Pamela’s in Harlem, then spent the last couple days in bad weather at an empty Yale with Tom and Pauline and am now back in Brooklyn, of all peoples and places. Tommy’s in town this weekend. We’re going to the rodeo tomorrow at the Garden – VIP suhweeet! It was all the Make-a-Wish™ people had left over from last year - well, that or a day with Barney™.

I can’t take the constant pressure from the imminent switch to digital TV and am going to Buenos Aires on Monday to watch Law and Order in peace. Maybe the land of steaks and sun isn’t the best holiday spot for someone in my condition, but I feel fine and figure I can probably save some money to boot. Ann’s coming down at the end of January. I’ll be back in Brooklyn on February 9th.

I’m sad to miss the inauguration in DC, but I think I’ve already got the gist and feel much the same way:

Today marks the anniversary of my diagnosis: one year since the morning Adlai took me for the MRI that changed my life. And although it’s been a pretty horrible year, I am eternally (however long that is) grateful, obliged and indebted to family, friends and strangers for the love and support I’ve received since this nightmare began. So thank you.