A-LA: A necessary respite.
I'm very glad I came to this event rather than go with some of my first instincts and shuttle back and forth between home and the City of Hope.
I am reconnecting with a whole slew of geeky friends. Tadao-san, lodrelhai, happypickle, dburr, the A-LA crew, etc. Geeks is good folks, like I always say.
I am being careful about expenditures. I'm not eating high on the hog, I only got one "frivolous" item in the Dealer Room, and I'm also making sure that home and school stuffs don't suffer.
Tonight I'm going to City of Hope because tomorrow Richie will be discharged from the hospital. He begins an outpatient course of treatment, 1 infusion of Velcade/wk. The initial stuff I heard about the chemo agent was kind of ugly but I read it on a mailing list and usually people don't give happy reports about things on mailing lists...it's usually the people who get the side effects and don't have good outcomes who post. However, after some googling I have found that actually it's a brand-spanking-new treatment that got the ultra fast track from the FDA because it was yielding such promising results and was so well-tolerated. The doctors at Mission were pointing us towards Thalidomide because it was such a well-known treatment but Velcade just got approved as a first line treatment and it has less side-effects.
I have a fair amount of hope back. Richie's back to his normal weight, he's feeling good, and I just got to party with a bunch of geeks. I have memberships lined up not only for A-LA 4 in Burbank (Woodbury REPRESENT!) but also for Loscon around Thanksgiving Weekend. I have a fair amount of confidence I will be able to attend everything. Hopefully Richie will be strong enough to go to San Diego with me. I suspect it will be a lot of fun for him.
I am reconnecting with a whole slew of geeky friends. Tadao-san, lodrelhai, happypickle, dburr, the A-LA crew, etc. Geeks is good folks, like I always say.
I am being careful about expenditures. I'm not eating high on the hog, I only got one "frivolous" item in the Dealer Room, and I'm also making sure that home and school stuffs don't suffer.
Tonight I'm going to City of Hope because tomorrow Richie will be discharged from the hospital. He begins an outpatient course of treatment, 1 infusion of Velcade/wk. The initial stuff I heard about the chemo agent was kind of ugly but I read it on a mailing list and usually people don't give happy reports about things on mailing lists...it's usually the people who get the side effects and don't have good outcomes who post. However, after some googling I have found that actually it's a brand-spanking-new treatment that got the ultra fast track from the FDA because it was yielding such promising results and was so well-tolerated. The doctors at Mission were pointing us towards Thalidomide because it was such a well-known treatment but Velcade just got approved as a first line treatment and it has less side-effects.
I have a fair amount of hope back. Richie's back to his normal weight, he's feeling good, and I just got to party with a bunch of geeks. I have memberships lined up not only for A-LA 4 in Burbank (Woodbury REPRESENT!) but also for Loscon around Thanksgiving Weekend. I have a fair amount of confidence I will be able to attend everything. Hopefully Richie will be strong enough to go to San Diego with me. I suspect it will be a lot of fun for him.