NOT QUITE UN-GROGGIFIED... BUT ALMOST

Greetings from Loveland, Ohio, my hometown. Snow is on the ground, Dad has been chopping wood so we can relax by the fireplace every night, Mom’s been cooking my favorite meals, and Dave has made himself available so that we can hang out whenever I feel up to it. Everywhere we go, of course, everything is red and green and glittery—Christmastime is here and I feel like Halloween just ended. Time flies when you’re doped up on hydro-morphone, I guess.

So here I am—back to the keyboard (for the moment), typing with all five fingers on my right hand and my left forefinger. I’ve been anxious to post again but pain, weakness, nausea, and meds-induced haziness have kept me away, kept me sitting quietly in my father’s Lazy-boy, drifting in and out of consciousness, the barf-bin nearby and the containers of meds (ten of them in all) lined up neatly on the kitchen counter. It’s December 21st (the one month anniversary of the surgery), and I’m back.

Now, this isn’t going to be a long post—I have very little news and even less energy—but I wanted to give you a quick update on how things are:

Since we arrived here from NIH two weeks ago, I’ve only ventured out of the house a few times. The scar is healing up nicely and the neck pain is beginning to ease. My legs have been bothering me a little—much like they did back when I was on chemo—but I’m hoping they’ll feel better after I get myself moving a little more. My first weekend here I started vomiting constantly and ended up in the emergency room getting hydration and anti-vomiting medication (more on that in subsequent posts)… The vomiting is pretty much under control now and everything with the GI track (ahem) is good too. My left hand is still significantly weaker than it was before the surgery, but the Hand Specialist I visited here in Cincinnati doesn’t think that physical therapy will help. He said that the hand will probably strengthen up on its own as time passes and the nerve pathways heal. This sounds logical to me but I’m still going to see another doctor, a rehab guy, to see if he agrees.

All in all, I’m feeling okay—just very weak, very tired. My life right now demands a lot of patience. Everything takes more time—walking up stairs, getting in and out of cars, putting on my braces and shoes and taking them off…. I need more help with regular, everyday stuff and I need more rest than I ever have before. I’m just healing I suppose. As people keep telling me, recovering from major surgery isn’t easy.

Regardless, I’ll be posting more soon—I promise. I want to talk in detail about the last month, tell you about it all from my perspective, and share more with you about recovery and healing.

For now, MERRY CHRISTMAS and HAPPY CHANNUKAH! I hope everyone has a wonderful holiday.

More soon,
D

FAREWELL NIH

As promised, my farewell post. As luck would have it, it's also Dan's farewell to NIH -- at least for the next six weeks at which point he'll need to return briefly for a follow-up MRI scan. Just when we were thinking his stay would last another week (due to some conflicting appraisals from the dozen or so staff members studying Dan), he found out yesterday that he could leave this morning. So now he's more than better, he's free ... and scurrying back to Cincinnati with his family as I write this.

The choice to go to Cincy was a simple one. Dan's family wanted to have him around for the first couple weeks out of the hospital. This is a much better idea than the default plan which involved Dan crashing at my place until the holidays -- spiffy accommodations, to be sure, but nothing on a par with Momma Joan's Home-Made Broth of Goodness. More likely, he would have dined on Karl Miller's Home-Made Uber-Caserole of Leftovers ... and promptly returned to the hospital with new ailments. So since Dan was going home for Jesusmas anyway, it seemed silly to spend the intervening week in DC or NYC.

The other rationale involves his future physical therapy. After a few hours with a PT at NIH, Dan was able to feel marked improvement in his left hand (a weakness that remains worse than before surgery). Hopefully, he can find a ... ahem ... Hand Specialist in his home town and work on rehabilitiating his most important apendage before returning to NYC (where a comparable specialist would most likely cost more). So it's off to Loveland's Ye Olde Tyme Hande Speicaliast and Apothecary this week.

I showed Dan the little click-to-give box in the sidebar and his first reaction was one of surprise and slight discomfort. I know this look well -- after rooming together for a year and sharing airtime at WUSO, Dan has given me this look a few times. I think the first time was when I sold one of his kidneys on E-bay so we could have cable that semester. Boy, did I undersell that one!

$59.95?! You sold my kidney for $59.95?! Karl, I'd be really mad at you if Siffle & Ollie wasn't on right now!

Put short: Dan's already a rather charitable guy himself so he tends to reject help when it's offered to him. But since a handful of people had already contributed before he even saw the thing, we figured it was okay to keep it there for now.

If you'd like Dan's new temporary mailing address in Cincinnati, shoot an email to dans.tumors@gmail.com and Dan will reply in person.

And on that note, I should sign off. Dan will also be posting on this site again so you can hear the true story from "the horse's mouth" (his words). I guess that makes me ... some other ... part of the horse. But you get the idea. Barring any wacky interstate travel mishaps, Dan will be posting here later today or tomorrow.

Thanks for checking in on him all this time! After the grogginess, the paralyzing headaches, and the whole NIH circus, Dan's eager to get back in touch with everyone. It's been a pleasure being your guest-blogger-tumortastic-tour-guide. It's an easy job to fill -- especially since it's for a guy who's helped me through more dark days than I can remember.

Take care ...

Karl

WEEKEND and MONDAY

I promised everyone a Friday night post, but couldn't deliver, alas. The basic story is the same: Dan's final task at NIH is to find a pain medication/anti-nausea formula that lets him stay on his feet for more than a day or two. Things were looking up Friday and Saturday morning -- Dan got to leave the hospital for a couple hours to eat with his family at the same Thai restaurant they visited on their way into town. I met up with them Friday night briefly and everything seemed to be on the mend. Dan was now in his normal clothes and downing unsafe portions of spicy foreign food just like before. But Saturday brought back fatigue, headaches, and more nausea, just as Dan's NYC housemate Mel was stopping by to visit.

Interesting trend. Beautiful lady friends keep popping in just as he's reaching for the barf bin. This would be funny in a some musical montage, but on the prose-bound blog scroll, it doesn't register.



Thought I'd sneak one more cartoon in there before I'm off this gig for good. No, Dan has not had any prosthetics attached during his stay. Although a real shady-looking doctor in the lobby said he could "hook us up" with one for $39.95. I guess that's a good price. I didn't find his pun funny, either, under the circumstances. But for now, Dan's sticking with his occupational therapy gadgets.

Dan's NIH roommate also arrived. He's majoring in econ and just got back from a semester in Spain. The Sig House wouldn't take him so ... no, wait. Dan's roommate is a theatre director, as luck would have it. So 7SW is the thespians wing, evidently. You need to separate them from the rest of the patients to preserve the research sample. Three street mimes down the hall are being treated for terminal ennui. Imagine if that spread! I met Dan's roomie last night with his wife (I presume) as they were just settling in. They seem nice and given his profession, the two of them will have lots to talk about.

So: why hasn't Dan returned to the blog just yet? Because despite recent strides towards independence, he's still susceptible to day-long pain/nausea attacks every once in a while. As he was explaining it to his nurse last night: headaches are the worst since he lives with chronic body pain every other day of the year. And when he IS free of headaches/pain/nausea, he wakes up to the prospect of returning to Manhattan where he's still trying to iron out his return to work.

With that in mind, I added a new little feature to the blog. You may have already noticed the Amazon.com click-to-give box in the sidebar. I put it there without telling Dan yet because I thought it'd be nice to petition the blogosphere for some digital headache relief dollars. NIH has paid for his surgery because his disease is still under research in a federally-funded protocal program. But because they're a research hospital (instead of a rehabilitiation hospital) they need to get him out and on his own as soon as possible. In short: they do the quick hard work and it's up to Dan to do the long-term readjustment after surgery. This is, of course, a blessing made possible by the US Government, but it leaves the New York rehabilitiation phase unsolved for now.

Before surgery, Dan was tutoring inner-city kids up in NYC and trying to write as much as possible on the side. Right now it's unclear how soon he'll be able to return to work, or if he will, or how often he'll be able to work when he does. Plus, he's got to pay off his Faberge Egg habit or Vinnie Casteluccio will have him whacked. But that aside, Dan's looking at a rocky holiday season, money-wise. So I figured I'd cyber-panhandle on his behalf. You can drop your couch change, your daily latte money, your ... gosh I sound like an NPR fundraiser now. You get the idea. The amazon.com link (bottom side-bar or here) lets you give however much you want, anonymously or not, into an online account that only Dan will be able to access. Provided, of course, he doesn't balk at the idea when I tell him about it. Still, I think it'd make a nice welcome back gesture.

I'm going to visit him again tonight if he's up for it. But hopefully my next post will be my last post and you can hear the whole tale from a gentleman who knows how to spell.

-->KM

Thursday & Villanelle

Quick update -- and another belated one. I ended that last post on a bummer and haven't been near a working computer in two days, so here's the story. After a pretty rough Tuesday (more pain med switch-ups), Dan was back in action on Wednesday and today. So now the staff at NIH has been filling up his itinerary with physical therapy, occupational therapy, relaxtion therapy, etc.

And if you thought the Super NIH Fork 2600 was an exaggeration, you should see the Inspector Gadget meets The Thirty-Six Dollar Man stuff they gave him yesterday. One neat toy (which must have cost the government $4k to make) is a retractable metal arm with two compressing suction cups on the end. The sort of thing you might find in Sharper Image: a monogrammed golf ball retriever. Anyway, it's pretty fun and I'll get a real picture to prove it.

"Do not go gentle into that good night.
Rage, rage against the dying of the light."

About seven years ago, Dan and I started trading that quote as an encouraging mantra when we went to audition for things at Witt. The sort of pretentious-slogan/casual-allusion you might expect from two bookish theatre geeks. After years of use, the quote gradually boiled down to a simple "rage, rage" coupled with one of those knuckle-knocking handshakes the kids are into these days. So this was our pre-audition, pre-performance, post-show gesture and over the past two weeks, no matter how awake Dan has or hasn't been, the reflexive knuckle-quotey-thingy has stayed in tact. That's a really random anecdote, but not so random when you go back to the whole Dylan Thomas villanelle.

In other news, Dan's parents have taken to sleeping in their own room at The Lodge instead of building pillow forts in the Day Room at NIH, nightly. Dan's family will be around until next Wednesday at which point Dan will most likely be out of the hospital. The next question (now that the nausea, diet, painkiller questions have been figured out) is: how much physical therapy will Dan need once he's on his feet? The major new affliction has been a weakness in the left (dominant) hand -- which doesn't prevent driving, but does slow down typing. He's been answering some e-mails using his non-dominant right hand and the forefinger of his left. I think we call all agree that Dan's more prolific and erudite with 60% of his digits working than most people are with 100%. But he'll still need some ongoing PT to get lefty back in gear.

Other than that -- I should tell you that tomorrow will most likely be my final post here at DansTumors. Dan's eager to get back to work giving you the whole story, sans drawing. But instead of cheap stick figures, he's got ... New MRI's! Some wild before and after shots of what they did two Mondays ago. If you're lucky and ask real nice, the man might even show you his Terminator 2 surgical staples or something.

-->KM