Mouth Sores Redux

I have mouth sores again.  This time its not ulcers like the previous two times.  But a swollen bump in the right side of my tongue.  More towards the bottom, but inside.  It feels like a sebacious cyst in hardness, but it hurts to the touch.  And it appeared rather quickly.  Probably just another viral infection, which will hopefully pass w/ none of the fanfare and asskicking of the last one.

In other news, I switched my injection days to Sunday, Tuesday, and Thursday evenings.  I was going in to the studio Tuesday and Thursday after injecting the night before, and it was just plain not fun.  So I switched so I can lay low the days after injection, and be fresher when I am in the studio.

Interferon’s History

From O:

Uh, this was the first google result, but not the one i intended:

http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?sec=health&res=9806E7DB1239F932A35753C1A963948260

it’s from 1985! it said “‘It’s been a medication in search of a disease.'”

shit, and look at this from 1983:

http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?sec=health&res=9807EED71239F931A15750C0A965948260

early AIDS crisis! oh wow, it contains the sentence, “Most researchers
believe AIDS is caused by an unknown virus.” actually, that’s a super
interesting article, from an historical perspective…

i am totally liveblogging this google search!

ok, actually, there are almost 6,000 NYT articles related to IFN:
http://query.nytimes.com/search/sitesearch?query=interferon&srchst=cse

super interesting. lost of uses, lots of side fx…

this is the one i was looking for:
http://health.nytimes.com/ref/health/healthguide/esn-hepatitisC-ess.html

yours in sleeeep

Apples and Peanut Butter

On Sep 24, 2008, at 2:12 PM, addwag wrote:

i was thinking about that analogy that monk gave you about billy’s bakery..

what if you love cupcakes and then you resist getting a cupcake and then after a while you no longer crave or need cupcakes- which is the goal?

then do you lose what you love because you resist it? and if so, what do you love instead?

i think that for him it is all about controlling and submlimatng desire.  and chanelling that energy into meditation (and all the god stuff.)

but for me, it is more important as an analogy of changing behaviors.  understanding how behaviors are created and reinforced.  positive and negative.

i *had* to do this (w/o really understanding the process) when i got off of caffeine 10 years ago.  i had to do this just this past month with learning to incorporate the neti pot into my twice-daily ablutions.  and i’ve definitely had to do this with meditation. but there is a point of inflection, where it gets easier and easier to do (and harder and harder to not do.)  that is the real point.

but when you leave something behind, you always have the memory.  sometimes its not the love for the thing itself, but your desire for something.  and sometimes desire is something good to get rid of.  covetousness desire.  greedy desire.

the IFN makes it so i don’t like chocolate.  i used to *love* chocolate.  and for now, that love is gone.  and at first it was terribly sad for me.  i felt like i was missing part of myself.  but love of chocolate isn’t me, its just something i had.  it was replaced with love of watermelon.  now that watermelon is no longer in season, i have love of apples and peanut butter.  things come and go.

Another mole removed

I guess these are technically biopsies.  This is the second one post Melanoma diagnosis.  The first one was expected negative.  The dermatologist removed it because it was on the back of my leg and hard for me to track it.

My mother saw this one, and thought it was new.  I have no idea.  The dermatologist thought it looked healthy, but we removed it anyway.  Its the mom-principle.

one more biopsy

My Interferon: Mega Packaging

This is how my Interferon came.  Super well done packaging.  It had been shipped overnight from Florida.  The ice was largely unmelted.  As an experiment, I left the ice in the styrofoam, and it took two more days to melt in full.  72 hours of cold.

I was actually quite anxious about making sure i was able to get the package, and that the drugs would be cold, etc.  It was a *huge* relief when I saw that it was so well packaged.

This arrived about two weeks ago.  I just finished my first week back on the drugs.  It went fine.  I’ll ramp up from 10 MIU to 20MIU next week.

interferon shipping box

interferon shipping box

Inteferon Dreams

I restarted my IFN last night.  My mom arrived yesterday.  This is actually a coincidence.  But it was really nice to have her here while I tried to pretend i wasn’t nervous.  I can’t quite tell whether i was actually calm, or was in denail.  previously it was clearly denial, w/ a lot of pacing.  but today, after a week of meditating, and my mom’s comforting and distracting presence, i think i might actually have been somewhere in the middle.  close enough to the middle, that I don’t know.

I just woke up.  Its 7:30AM.  I have a headache.  I had the usual chills, though less fever than normal. woke at 4:30, and only kind of slept after that.

Clearly my unconscious was churning through the implications of restarting the IFN.  I had a series of dreams about IFN, science, and weakness.  One I only remember as me on a mountain bike, trying to climb a hill, and getting passed and yelled at: this is about the bully who rides in Prospect Park, and who yelled at me last time i rode there.  I remember one about camping with my mother in snow (she has car camped w/ me once or twice tops.)  But the best one was another naked school dream.

I was in the audience at the front of a lecture hall listening to a lecture on the immune system.  It was a young female professor.  She went through all of the obvious functions of the immune system, the lymph nodes, whats in blood, red blood cells, white blood cells, platelets, and some other stuff that i remember from my many bloodwork results (billyrubin, leukocytes, neutraphil, etc).  Then she talked about Interferons, which stimulate neutrophil?  I forget.  I was repeating the pseudo-high school science lesson i’ve gotten over the course of this process.  Things I never really knew.

Then the lecture happened again, except this time it was a song i knew.  But only kindof.  I was singing along to the lyrics to comfort myself, b/c at the same time it was the song, it was also the same immune system lecture.  The young co-eds to my left and right were indignant — I mean, I am tone deaf, and didn’t know half of the lyrics to whatever song it was.  One of them (on the left) said, “do you actually know this song?” in a tone that made it clear she was really saying “shut up asshole.”  When she got to the part about Inteferons, and the side effects of Interferon therapy, and listed them all, and talked about how hard it was, i said out loud “I have that.”  And I started crying.

At that moment, the class was dismissed, and the co-eds kind of dissappeared, but kind of registered their surprise and also disgust/fear of me. I get up, and realize that i’m only wearing a t-shirt.  chest is covered, but the choice bits are poking out the bottom (LOL).  as per usual with naked dreams, i’m not that embarrassed, just concerned about the difficulties it sets up.  I try to get out of the lecture hall, which actually is surrounded by an airport like structure, with big pillars, and caverns, but no gates or planes.

Somehow I realize that I’m supposed to teach the same class for the third time around.  I hear “well, if your such an expert, why don’t you just teach the class.”  I try to escape via the caverns in the edges of the building, while someone comes in singing with a choir from the entrance door, and makes their way to the dias at the front of the room.  They are singing an a capella motown/gospel song; all i could make out was the refrain: “Here comes the Doctor.  Here comes the Doctor.”

I escape to the outside (maybe i magically get pants, maybe not, i can’t remember.) The young co-ed on my right comes up to me on the path away from the big building and touches me with a big rolled up sheet of paper.  She offers it to me.  I open it.  It is that 2 foot by 3 foot size of paper that comes in pads and is used in classrooms in lieu of a chalkboard/whiteboard.  There are words on it written in in black whiteboard marker.  I don’t remember what it said.

I’m hungry now.  I’m starting to get some fever action.  Going to eat cereal and lie back down.