Slow Monster

Last weekend Coop and I were at the playground and one of his favorite games is to have Dad, or honestly anyone willing, be a monster. But since he’s a considerate kid and knows I’m recovering he asked me “Dada, can you be a slow monster?” So yeah, that’s where I’m at a month out from surgery - slow monstering… Is the opening I wanted to use ideally without caveats. But well that just wouldn’t match my luck recently. While working on this post this morning I tested positive for Covid. At this point I feel like a one man season of House. Luckily my symptoms are mild, but it will potentially impact everything else planned for the week.

So what's gone well? I’ve set a 2025 PR for most days straight not in the hospital, definitely a low bar but I’ll take it. I did go to Urgent Care today, but didn't spend the night so the streak is alive. My surgery wounds are recovering well and the drains and staples got pulled a week ago, so I'm back down to just lugging around 1 bag. And I started back at work which provides a nice distraction from the rest of this.

What's not gone well? Oh don’t worry there’s more than Covid. They discovered a pulmonary embolism and portal vein thrombosis (google that one) on a follow up CT. Scary stuff but both clots are stable and I’m being treated for them now - just another issue to add to the ever growing list and being on blood thinners makes everything else slightly more complicated. Story of my life at the moment.

Recovery is a 2 step forward, 1 step backward process so it’s been slow going and not without its setbacks. Which means my energy levels fluctuate a lot, hence the lack of blog posts and other communication. Turns out Covid, anemia, PE/PVT, plus you know the cancer and Crohn's makes you tired, like really tired. And non medically there’s a fascist man child in the White House again and he appears to have surrounded himself with other shit heads so that's not really helping. Oh snap he got political, if you really just came here for the Jim updates hopefully that’s where this lives most of the time. But it’s hard not to comment on the fact that Julie, a HS teacher, is learning how to prepare for an ICE raid, to be clear an ICE raid at a school where children go to learn. And on top of all of that, if our esteemed president decides to fuck with health insurance you’ll certainly be hearing about it.

Next week, assuming I’m feeling better, I’ll be starting a clinical trial to finally get back to treating the melanoma. Once again I’ll get to be a more opinionated lab rat for a pharmaceutical company. It’s a phase 1 study so not many people have been treated yet which means there’s certainly no guarantee of a good outcome. Being able to join a clinical trial is a nice opportunity, but it does mean that the standard of care treatments are not working as well as we’d like. If you’re curious to learn more https://clinicaltrials.gov/study/NCT05901285 but make sure you have a Google or WebMD window open.

That’s all folks,

Slowest of Monsters