Category Archives: Rancho Roly Poly

Hair loss and exhaustion masking good news

Posted on October 29, 2014 | 6 comments

Post-chemo (Monday’s second round), Mrs. Charm is moving slowly about the Rancho, almost like someone twice her age. Her energy of the past ten days is nowhere in evidence. Her hair loss which began late last week also makes it harder to ignore what’s happening to her. Only her faded Paddington-Bear hat makes it seem like old times.

But her cancer doc said Monday the energy will return in a week or two, the hair will grow back eventually (though probably not for several more months), and, best of all, the cancer-swollen lymph nodes definitely are shrinking. So joy—momentarily in abeyance—continues at Rancho Roly Poly.

Further enhanced by several containers of goodies delivered yesterday by a favorite work colleague, the latest in the tidal wave of home-cooked and bought meals from many friends to show her how much they love her. Which makes me feel smart all over again for marrying her.

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Posted in Cancer, Mrs. Charm, Rancho Roly Poly

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Random thoughts

Posted on October 28, 2014 | 3 comments

Of all the ways there are to get f**ked nowadays, the oldest profession still is among the most pleasant.

Even if the drug industry succeeds in replacing the dwindling supply of working antibiotics, some doctors will keep sabotaging the new ones by prescribing them for viral and other non-bacterial conditions. It’s ironic that the one group, doctors, that should know better is the one group causing the problem.

I keep confusing climatology with cosmetology.

I remember (1964) that education was the easy major for the girls and a few not-very-bright males. K-12 was at least as useless in the 1950s as it is now. As for why there are few men teachers today, could be because teaching at K-12 doesn’t pay very well for an educated, ambitious person.

Pols: And while we have all your attention focused on this trendy distraction, I’m going to get a bag full of money THIS BIG from a lobbyist to do something much harder for you peasants to understand but much more profitable for me and my cronies.

The employment of kings. Doesn’t every child aspire to be a fed?

All pols lie, but Obama is a chronic liar. He lies like an adolescent, which is to say about everything, small things and big things. He doesn’t differentiate. And it’s always someone else’s fault.

I guess you have to be a lawyer to appreciate this game of waiting to hear what our robed rulers will decide next. Politicians are just a sideshow to their main show.

Really funny how the Web catches up Old Media, and forces them to go in and scrub their old posts. I bet they dream of the old days when nobody remembered what they said a few years back, unless they clipped it out and few would bother.

If conservatives stopped writing about what MSNBC does, no one else would know.

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Posted in Rancho Roly Poly, Scribbles, The Culture

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All systems go for second round of chemo

Posted on October 17, 2014 | 4 comments

Mrs. Charm passed her recent blood tests such that the doc cleared her to grocery shop for the first time in weeks. Good thing, too, as I was weary of trying to find all the brands she specifies. A real treasure hunt. I still doubt whole wheat blueberry waffles exist.

All systems are go for a second round of chemo on the 27th. Unfortunately it’s the second one where the hair generally falls out. It’ll probably be traumatic since she hasn’t seen her head since she was an infant and didn’t know what it was then. I am doing Web searches on scarves and other soft head-coverings. Any ideas?

Otherwise, joy has returned to Mudville (i.e. Rancho Roly Poly) as Mrs. C. actually has some energy, in spurts at least, between the usual bouts of lethargy. Probably the two recent get-well cards from her colleagues helped. I haven’t see so many notes and signatures since I graduated from high school.

And the cooked meals continue to arrive at least twice weekly with more than enough for leftovers. We like the homemade ones best, even the black-beans-and-rice health-food concoction the other day, but they’re all good. And free, too. Who could argue with free?

4 Comments

Posted in Cancer, Mrs. Charm, Rancho Roly Poly

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In the chemo ward

Posted on October 10, 2014 | 5 comments

You might think the chemotherapy ward would make the cancer center’s waiting room look jolly. In fact, little of the latter’s trepidation is apparent in the former.

Probably because most of the people being infused through plastic tubes attached to hanging plastic bags of toxic chemicals are the lucky ones. If the chemo isn’t working to kill their cancers they don’t stay for long. Their docs can spot success or failure pretty quick. So smiles are more common than not. Even if the stuff does play hell with the body.

First-timers like Mrs. Charm are placed near the front where the nurses and techs hover about solicitously. Sometime after her first hour, we found out why. Mrs. C. got chills so bad her teeth were chattering. The nurses brought blankets and eased the flow back a notch or two. When the chills subsided without any serious effects, they moved it back up. There were no more chills.

The room wasn’t crowded the day we were there. Most of the patients were middle-aged, as you would expect, about evenly divided between men and women. But there was one man in his eighties and two women in their twenties. Primary care givers got chairs to sit beside their patients.

The hairless ones were identifiable by their hats or scarves. Hair loss usually begins after the second cycle, which comes after about four weeks of recovery from the first infusion. The chemo attacks dividing cells and it can’t discriminate between cancer cells and healthy ones. Cells at the roots of hair follicles seem to be particularly vulnerable.

After Mrs. C.’s six hours of infusion, she pronounced herself feeling “better than I have in a long time.” Ninety-six hours later (including another six hours of blood transfusions and a quick shot of white-blood cells) she tires easily and is a little puffy at the ankles. Her sense of taste and smell have turned finicky. Her recurrent fever of the past few weeks, however, has happily disappeared.

So there’s hope at the Rancho. We’ll get the doc’s early verdict on progress next week. If it’s as positive as Mrs. C. feels she’ll be among the lucky ones who get to continue in the chemo ward—hair loss and all.

5 Comments

Posted in Cancer, Mrs. Charm, Rancho Roly Poly, Science/Engineering

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Tentative smiles at the cancer center

Posted on September 29, 2014 | 4 comments

Tentative smiles, that is, among the patients. The staff smiles until you wonder if their faces will crack open and their mouths fill with blood. We primary care-givers also smile tentatively, keying on our patients.

I’m a primary care-giver now that Mrs. Charm has been diagnosed with Stage III Diffuse Large B Cell Lymphoma, DLBCL. Tentatively. Still awaiting results of this morning’s bone-marrow biopsy and this week’s PET scan to make sure it isn’t some other type of lymphoma. The lymphoma part is definite.

Infusion port to be installed in her upper chest soon for the chemo to begin (tentatively) week of Oct. 6. Drill thereafter is one six-hour day of infusion of R-CHOP (unlovely acronym) followed by three weeks of recovery.

Then another six hours of toxic infusions and so on for (ideally) about six months. Otherwise Mrs. C will not be among the 55-70 percent for whom R-CHOP works (for at least two years, hopefully longer) and then it will be on to the radiation and, probably even more tentative smiles as the burning further diminishes her health.

There’s little joy in Mudville, i.e. Rancho Roly Poly, these days. Mr. Boy (a new high school freshman) and I are hanging (appropriate word) in there. Tentatively.

4 Comments

Posted in Cancer, Mr. Boy, Mrs. Charm, Rancho Roly Poly, Science/Engineering

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Are video games a sport?

Posted on September 15, 2014 | Comments Off on Are video games a sport?

At least one, League of Legends, is. And varsity, at that. At least at one private university, Robert Morris, in Chicago. Why, they’re even offering scholarships.

Which I found Googling the title question after seeing it posed for an essay in Mr. B.’s high school English class. And I thought he’d been wasting his time all these months. ‘Course he is playing Call of Duty, which is not on the team. Yet.

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Posted in Mr. Boy, Obsessions, Rancho Roly Poly, The Culture

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Idiot pleads youth

Posted on August 8, 2014 | 2 comments

“I’m scared. Very scared,” [Jacob] Lavoro said. “I’m 19 years old and still have a whole life ahead of me. Take that into account.”

Uh-huh. Not to mention the stupidity of making marijuana brownies and selling them for $25. Each? Doesn’t say. Surely this youthful idiot in Georgetown, just up the road from the rancho, is not a native Texan.

Must be a recent arrival, though unless he’s from Colorado or Washington, he ought to have considered the likelihood of maximum jail time looming for drug dealers in America’s unjust but longstanding drug war.

To the extent 19 year olds consider anything but their hairstyle (notice the photo at the link of his pre-trial hipster demeanor, considerably cleaned up for his courtroom appearances). I foresee a goodly portion of your “whole life ahead” being spent in Huntsville, Jacob. You won’t be skating out of this one.

2 Comments

Posted in Rancho Roly Poly, Texana, The Drug War

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