March 31, 2012 Play Ball!

As we approach the beginning of April, I have to admit that my heart starts beating just a little stronger. I have never hid my love for the game of baseball and another season is just around the corner. It was just a little over 50 years ago that I remember my dad talking about the Reds on their way to the 1961 National League pennant. I didn’t really understand much about the game at the time because very few games were on TV and we just didn’t have the money to go to Cincinnati and take in games.

I quickly became a fan as baseball was America’s pastime in the early 60’s. Football had yet to see the explosion after the start of the Super Bowl, the NBA was of little interest to anyone outside the cities that they played and hockey was played in eight cities that were mostly in Canada or the extreme northern part of the US. By the time I started playing baseball myself at the age of eleven, I was addicted. Everything about the game intrigued me. The smell of a new glove or a well used baseball. The sound of the ball as it meets the bat. The sight of the ball throwing up chalk as it hits the foul line. The mental process of deciding who should hit against who. It was the perfect game.

I did everything I could to learn about baseball, waiting patiently for the mailman to show up on Thursdays with my Sporting News. I had every baseball card each year and I would spend hours memorizing the backs of those cards. I would throw a super ball against the brick wall next to our garage so that I could work on my fielding. I would fungo hit 200 baseballs a day because there was no one to pitch to me.

All of that work in the back yard didn’t get me very far as I peaked at the age of 12 and rode a speeding runaway car to the end of my career three years later. That didn’t keep me from my love affair with the sport, however. I watched whenever I could and fell asleep to many ballgames on my transistor radio smuggled into my room hidden under my pillow.

My Reds were not very good at that time, but I still kept a vigil hoping for another miracle like what happened in 1961. Every year it was the same old thing. I would hope for the best in the spring but watch some other team in the World Series. But in the spring it was magical, I could always convince myself at the beginning of the season that there was new life, there was always a chance. It was a new life, a chance to start over with unbridled hope.

If you think about it, there are only a few times in our lives that we get to start all over. I still remember the last quarter when I was attending UC. One of my engineering buddies and I were walking down the hallway after our last finals and he just threw his books and slide rule down the hall in a fit of pleasure that it was all over. When we move from one job to the next, we receive an opportunity to start all over with a clean slate.

The thing about baseball and the new season is that it wipes out what has happened in the past and every team starts out at the same spot with zero wins and zero losses. Any failures that have happened in the past can be forgotten and we can just move on. We, as humans, every once in a while need a clean slate, an opportunity to start all over. It seems that our failures seem to follow us more than our successes. The old saying at work is that 100 “atta boys” gets forgotten with one “Oh crap!”

I guess that I am at one of those crossroads and I am getting a clean slate. I just received my latest results from my blood work and I have zero losses. For the first time since I found out that I have Multiple Myeloma, the level of cancer in my blood stream is virtually non-detectable. My Lambda Free Light Chains are at 1.81 with a “normal” range of 0.57 to 2.63. If somebody just picked up blood work and looked at it, they would likely not suspect that I have a blood disorder.

This is certainly exciting news for me. It doesn’t mean that I am cured. It doesn’t mean that the cancer has gone away. It doesn’t even mean that I can stop taking chemo. What it does mean is that this little combo of chemotherapies and steroids that I am taking is doing the job, better than anything that I have taken in the past. I will see Dr. Mikhael next week and my hope is that he will consider letting me back off the chemo a bit so that I only take it every other week instead of every week. Normally they like to wait four months before such a move, but I hope to use the medical knowledge that I have picked up watching “House” for the last eight years to change his mind. The belief is that the less I use of it now the longer that it will last. Keep your fingers crossed.

March 12, 2012 - The Waste of a Life

I haven’t written in a while and I apologize for that, but to be honest, I have struggled with the topic that I’m going to discuss and that is Whitney Houston’s death. I could not make up my mind if I wanted to pursue it, but as we have gotten further from her death, I feel that it will be easier to discuss.

Whitney Houston, like many entertainers, was given a remarkable talent. Beautiful, vibrant and with the voice of an angel, she burst on the music scene like an atomic bomb. She was everywhere. She sold millions of albums, appeared in movies and ended up on the cover of every beauty and entertainment magazine. Yet, twenty years later, she died alone in a hotel still fighting demons that had taken over her life.

How many times have we seen this happen? In my lifetime alone, drugs and alcohol have taken the lives of so many entertainers and musicians that they are almost too numerous to list. Just to name a few: Janis Joplin, Jimi Hendrix, Jim Morrison, John Belushi, Chris Farley, Amy Winehouse, Judy Garland, Michael Jackson and Heath Ledger. This doesn’t even include the names of people that didn’t die directly as a result of drugs but where substance abuse indirectly led to their death such as Elvis Presley. The list goes on and on. I could fill up the page with names.

The reason that I am even discussing this is that I find it so tragic. These people were all given an amazing talent. We all have our talents, but those that choose entertainment can reach such highs and lows that their rather unique psyches often struggle with both the good times and the downtimes which they will inevitably find. As a result, they look for crutches or a new high that their normal life cannot give them.

In the end, they throw away everything. Even before their deaths, their lives are miserable. They fail to understand that their life, as it is, has value. Unless they can return to the unbelievable heights that they had reached, they become dependent on other means to simulate their previous highs. Obviously, this isn’t restricted to entertainers, but because their lives become headlines, we know them so much more easily.

What is truly sad is that there are so many of us that just have normal lives that are willing to go through so much to just keep living. I’m not just talking about those of us that are currently fighting illness, but those that work hard every day just to keep their family in food and clothing. Life is a struggle. It doesn’t matter how much money you make or how famous you are. This is not easy. Yet, somehow, we all pull up out bootstraps every day and work through it without having to “escape” through drugs or alcohol.

Certainly addiction is a powerful and awful thing. I understand that. Today we have become so politically correct that we even label it as a disease. I’ve never been fond of that dumbing up of the situation. There are those that have a greater propensity to addiction, I’ll give you that, but at the same time they weren’t born addicted. They did not feel fine, have a physical and find out that they were gravely ill. They made a choice, most of us that are fighting for our lives, didn’t.

I don’t feel sorry for Whitney Houston. I feel sorry for those she left behind. She should have thought about them before she thought about herself.


Another person I don’t feel sorry for is myself. I have been given a hand to deal with and I’m doing the best I can to squeeze every little bit out of life that I can. To that end, I changed my chemotherapy six weeks ago. Before that, my cancer numbers were getting worse and worse. I was actually starting to get a little nervous. There are only so many drugs out there for me and one of the most popular had failed. I wasn’t going to give up, but the cancer had gotten my attention.

When I received the email with my blood results a couple of weeks ago I was anxious to open it up and check that magic number next to the “lambda light chains.” This is the absolute number that let’s me know what the cancer is doing. A person without Multiple Myeloma would likely be under 2.0. Last month, my number jumped from 20 to 46.

I always hope for the best, but this time the number that I saw just didn’t look right. It just couldn’t be what I saw. I looked and then looked again. I sent an email to the person (Megan, my former Stem Cell Coordinator) that sent me the information and I asked her to confirm what I saw. It was 3.19!!!! Not 31.9 or 319, it was 3.19, almost normal. Now understand, this doesn’t mean that I am close to being cured or even getting off of chemo. What it does mean is the new combination is kicking some serious tail, better than anything that I have done before!

We will continue with the every week injections and pills for the time being. Over the next few months we will monitor my level to see if the chemo cocktail stays effective. If it does, hopefully, I will be able to reduce the frequency of the injections. Let’s all keep our fingers crossed.

If you can’t tell, I have a big smile on my face!