It's About Time

I've been a long time coming, but I'll be a long time here.

People have been telling me that I should start a blog somewhere. As my friend Karen Fenton once put it "I'm having a moment of inertia." In my defense, I've been kind of sick for a while.

In March 2005 I was diagnosed with multiple myeloma, a very nasty bone marrow cancer. After extensive chemotherapy and two bone marrow stem cell transplants, I'm definitely doing better, but I'm not out of the woods yet. Recently, I have relapsed. (Although since the doctors never declared that I was in remission, I'm not sure telling me that I relapsed is all that informative.) Anyway, there is a protein called immunoglobulin gamma (IgG) which is indicative of how active my particular form of myeloma is. From January to June of 2006, the IgG level steadily fell. However, over the summer it started rising again, to the point that it got almost back up to the January level by mid-August. The doctors put me back on thalidomide, which is one of the drugs I was on for all four rounds of chemotherapy last year. It apparently is pretty effective against so-called 'refractory' myeloma, so we are hopeful that this will help. Unfortunately thalidomide has some pretty serious side effects. The most serious is probably peripheral neuropathy, which is the degeneration of nerves in the limbs, particularly in the hands and feet. The problem manifests itself first with a tingling, pins-and-needles sensation in the fingers. So far that hasn't happened, although I did experience that last year when I was on higher doses of thalidomide. The main problem I'm experiencing now is dizziness, nausea and general dopiness. The only upside of that so far is that thalidomide has cured my insomnia.

Regarding writing, I've been storing up a long list of topics about which I have something to say. At least I think I do. Having never actually written out my thoughts on these topics, it's hard to say how coherent they will be when finally put down as bytes in a database. We shall see.