Bad News, Better News

Two days after the van died, I sat down with Paula, a close friend at work. She is 40 years old, with a two-year-old girl (who is very cute), and she had gone for her baseline mammogram that morning. When I asked about it, she said she had not done the test. I assumed that she had somehow been detained (maybe her car died?), but no. Her doctor had found a lump, and she had been rescheduled for a more extensive mammogram.

We had a weird conversation that ranged from genuine concern to morbid speculation to gallows humor. By the time her next appointment rolled around, all the fears brought up in that first conversation seemed pretty overwrought. There was still a good chance the lump was nothing. But it wasn't nothing; it looked like cancer, and a couple of days later, that was confirmed.

It was a bit of a shock. Someone that young, you just never think they might die, but breast cancer is a scary phrase, and suddenly you are forced to acknowledge that it could happen. We both knew someone at work, younger than my friend, who died from breast cancer a few years ago.

I began to look up breast cancer topics on the Internet and set goals of a sort for Paula: maybe she could avoid chemo, maybe it hadn't spread to her lymph nodes. Mostly, I hoped the staging would not be any worse than 2B, which has a very high survival rate.

At first, the news was going in the wrong direction. There was cancer in at least one lymph node, a mastectomy is unavoidable, she has to have chemo, likely radiation too, treatment will last about a year (yikes), and reconstruction won't happen for another year after treatment.

However, at some point the news seemed to hit bottom and start to get better. She should get to keep one breast; her scans didn't show any further spread. Most importantly, it looks like she is stage 2A or 2B, and her doctor told her they are going to cure her.

I know it gets to her sometimes, but she has kept a sense of humor and seems in reasonable spirits, all things considered. It's going to be a tough haul, and I may not be there to share the experience [that's foreshadowing -- see my next post], but she's going to be OK. I'll settle for that.

Not Quite 200,000 Miles

I never lost any sleep over the van. As we drove away from it for the last time, knowing that we would never drive it again, I didn't care. A car is just a car.

At the same time that our dog was dying of cancer, our Chrysler Town and Country van started giving us trouble. A couple of times I joked morbidly that I wasn't sure which would die first; it turned out to be the van.

On the same trip I mentioned in my previous post -- when Lily had to be moved from one kennel to another -- our van had serious problems. We had to drive 1,000 miles one way to Tulare, CA for an archery tournament. The van had 195,000 miles on it, so we were going to take my Taurus, but we changed at the last minute because Western Washington was covered in ice and snow, and the van had all-wheel drive. It was still in pretty decent shape, so we didn't anticipate any problems.

We drove all the way to Sacramento in one day. We were leaving Marie Calendar's, headed for a motel, when the power steering went out. I drove to a parking lot, where a guy stopped and showed us that the serpentine belt had fallen off. He gave us the name of a repair place nearby, but it was late evening by then.

If you don't know what a serpentine belt is, here's a little primer: 1) they call it that because it snakes all around, and 2) if it comes off, your car stops working real quick. I managed to drive the car about a quarter mile to a motel, although even that quarter mile was an adventure. The lights shut off, the wipers stopped working, the steering was still out, but we made it.

As we were still 200 miles from our destination, planning to drive there the next morning, this seemed like a disaster; however, Jackie started putting a plan together. The next morning, we called Enterprise Car Rental (We'll pick you up!) and rented a car. They picked me up, and I went to rent a car while Jackie called the repair place and then AAA. I drove back to the motel in time to follow the tow truck to Perfection Auto in Elk Grove, CA.

While Perfection Auto worked on the van, Jackie drove the rental car on to Tulare with the boys for Lucas's archery tournament, and I waited in Elk Grove. Perfection got the car ready, and I drove to Tulare to meet Jackie and the boys. While Lucas was shooting in his tournament the next morning, Jackie and I drove down the street to the Tulare Enterprise and turned in the rental car. And that could have been the end of it, but it wasn't.

Enterpise and the tournament, at the Tulare Fairgrounds, were on the same street maybe two miles apart. We drove back from turning the car in, and in the parking lot at the fairgrounds, the power steering went out.

From there I'll shorten the story. Enterprise picked up Jackie and rented her the same car. A nice guy at a repair shop near the fairgrounds put the belt back on for me. We ended up driving two cars home, the van and a rental, and the van made it all the way back. Now it had 197,000 miles on it, and Jackie wouldn't drive it. Repairs to get it working well were going to be about as much as the car was worth. I drove it for three days, figuring we could get a few more months out of it. On the third day, the serpentine belt slipped off for the third time, and it died at an intersection in Issaquah, and that was it. We had it towed to our repair shop, where it still sits, waiting to be cannibalized for parts.

Jackie ended up with a high-end, nearly new Chevy Equinox, dark gray, which is the nice ride pictured above. This is the good thing about getting rid of a car; you end up better off, except for the cost.

My only regret was that we couldn't quite make it to 200,000 miles. That would have been cool.

It Started with the Dog

I have always been a pretty sound sleeper; insomnia is just not my problem, except when something is really bothering me. However, during the last two months I have had trouble sleeping on numerous occasions, and not for one reason but for a series of things.

It really started last year, with our almost-6-year-old dog, Lily. She had been slowing down for a while, but near year end she developed two large lumps nearly the size of tennis balls in her jowls. We took her to the vet for a biopsy, and when I picked her up, he told me what he suspected: cancer. However, when the results came back, it was a nasty infection, not cancer. We thought she had dodged a bullet.

She had to go through a long course of antibiotics. Because she would not eat consistently, we couldn't get her to take pills, so we forced liquid antibiotics into her mouth. She gagged on them, and she hated it, but she was pretty good about it. I think our other dog, Jackson, would have bitten us. When the first antibiotics ran out, the infection was not quite gone, so we had to keep giving them to her another week. But we figured she would get through it, and then she would be fine.

While we were giving her antibiotics, she almost completely lost her appetite, and she began to lose a lot of weight. When we finally finished the medicine, we thought she would regain her appetite and energy. Instead, she was very lethargic and would go a day or two without eating anything. We started feeding her different kinds of dog food, slices of ham, anything to get her to eat. Finally, we took her back to the vet and said that something was still wrong.

The vet took a blood sample and did an ultrasound, and the results didn't look good: probable lymphoma. About that time, we went on a short vacation and left the dogs in a kennel. The kennel owners transferred Lily to an indoor kennel, because she just couldn't function at the place she has always stayed. That week we took her back for the definitive test: an ultrasound-guided biopsy. The results removed any doubt; lymphoma, very advanced, in several places.

Jackie asked the vet how we would know when it was time to let Lily go. He said that she would lose energy, not want to eat, and have trouble breathing. By that time she had been displaying all those symptoms for weeks. We just figured we would keep her alive as long as she could function reasonably. We have a long set of stairs, and I said that when she couldn't climb them anymore, it might be time. But toward the end, I carried her up the stairs many times.

Lily started having seizures. She appeared confused at times, would walk into a corner and then just stop, like she wasn't sure how she got there. We managed to get her to eat by feeding her hamburger the last few days. We tried to keep her alive. At night she would stand up or sit up part of the time, and we could hear her panting. She got in the habit of standing beside the bed next to Jackie, and Jackie would spend part of the night petting her. I went to bed every night for a week wondering if Lily would be dead by morning, but she was always still there.

One day Jackie called me at work because Lily had a major seizure. I was in a meeting, so by the time I called back, everything was better. Still, I warned my friend John at work that I might be in late the next day, because I might be taking the dog to the vet in the morning.

That night, Lily had a very rough time. She was up and moving around, coming over to Jackie, breathing hard. She pooped on the floor in our room four times, something she had not done before that night. She had a bad case of diarrhea. Once during the night Jackie let her out back, and Lily climbed all the way up the stairs one last time, though I had not thought she could. By morning, we knew it was time.

I called the vet. We had the option of getting an appointment and staying with her or just dropping her off. It was hard enough dropping her off; I did not want to watch her die. I did not intend to ask for her ashes back, but Jarrod asked me to get them, and I wasn't going to deny him that. I took her to the vet and composed myself in the car before I took her in. I held it together pretty well at the vet, considering that I have trouble keeping my emotions in check. They asked if I wanted to go back with Lily and say a last goodbye. I said no. As they took her back, I looked the other way, out the window. I stood there and waited until they brought me her leash and collar, took them and left.

Yesterday, we picked up her ashes. I'm glad we have them. All that's left of her fits in a small urn. I loaded a picture of her when she was just a puppy on my desktop at work. The picture says 3/06/2005 on it; she was just a few weeks old. She made it to her sixth birthday, but not much longer.

I miss her more than I thought I would.

Health Care Stupidity of the Day

This study of public opinion and knowledge about the Affordable Care Act, by the Kaiser Family Foundation, highlights a fundamental problem with American politics today: conservatives don't know what they are talking about. Unfortunately, this does not stop them from being adamant in their opinions.

The study asks the type of questions that need to be asked more often. At they same time that the Foundation polled opinions, they tested responders' knowledge about the law. With this combined information, we can make some conclusions about the value of the opinions; if certain groups tend to be particularly ill-informed about an issue, it is only reasonable that we might want to dismiss their opinions, or at least give them less weight than more informed groups.

And, surprise surprise, conservative responders displayed their unrivaled ignorance when they had to answer some simple questions about the law. These are the percentages of certain groups who scored high (7 or more right out of 10) on the quiz that was included in the poll

People who want to repeal the whole law 13% high scorers
People who want to expand the law 38%

Republicans 18%
Democrats 32%

Fox News watchers 25%
CNN watchers 35%
MSNBC 39%

Conservatives and opponents of the law scored very poorly on the test as a whole compared to other groups. If you don't know anything about an issue, you logically should not express a strong opinion about it, but that doesn't stop today's conservatives. They are happy to watch Fox News, wrap themselves in ignorance, and screw things up for their more informed and responsible fellow citizens.

And if you think the phenomenon of conservatives not knowing even the simplest facts is confined to health care, you should just go turn on Fox News and enjoy yourself.