Endgame Viable

Contents

Morning!

It’s another very early morning and an unusually busy day for me.

I have a dental cleaning appointment this morning, so I have to hop to it and get ready for that. (For me, that means being ready hours early and then fretting about remembering to bring everything I’m supposed to and getting there at exactly the right time.)

Afterward, a friend is coming by with a truck to help throw out an old mattress and sofa that won’t fit in my SUV. It’s an old memory foam mattress, so it’s huge, heavy, floppy, and has no handles. A nightmare to move around.

It’s a busy week for me overall, and I don’t like it. Some people thrive on busy schedules, but I get overwhelmed very quickly if I have a lot of scheduled appointments all at once, particularly more than one in a day. I ended up with a lot scheduled this week so that leaves me permanently on edge.

I’m abandoning putting the Blaugust day in the titles. That was a terrible idea.

Radiologist

In heavy news, yesterday I met with my radiologist, one of the team of doctors led by my oncologist, who are responsible for killing cancer cells in my body. It turns out that the troublesome new cancer spot in my right hip is bigger than I thought, and is actually in my right butt bone.

I feel nothing of the new spot, but I’ll be starting the process of getting radiation treatments on it next week. It starts with a “CT simulation” appointment where they will put me in a CT scanner and build a computer model of the target area (I’m paraphrasing heavily from a ChatGPT explanation). Then, I imagine a week or so later, the actual treatments begin.

Last year I received radiation treatment on a spot in my left hip, and at that time, they tattooed three dots on me: One on my left hip, one on my right, and one on my lower abdomen. They use those dots to align the machine to my body so they don’t irradiate the wrong place. They’ll be using those same dot tattoos for this new treatment.

It wasn’t clear if it would be a week of daily treatments or two weeks of semi-daily treatments. Last time it was 5 days in a week, but this time he said it could be every other day. I assume that’ll be setup later. And it all has to work around my chemo schedule.

Anyway, the goal for the upcoming radiation is to kill off this cluster of cancer cells before they decide to start spreading, because these appear to have developed resistance to the treatments I’ve been getting for the last year. I can’t speak for everyone, but I personally don’t want to host treatment-resistant cancer cells. A weird quirk of mine.

It’s all a bit of a wake-up call, and a reminder that this thing I’m going through is not over, and this period where everything has felt calm and routine and under control is going to end at some point, when the cancer cells start to evolve and adapt to the treatments I’m getting. At which point they will have to start going to one or more of the second-line treatment options. (Things like different drugs or immunotherapy.)

So that’s the latest in the ever-evolving “cancer journey.”

Incidentally, my radiologist is one of the most laid-back doctors I’ve ever met. Usually I feel like doctors are trying to rush through your appointment to get to their next one, but a bunch of times I felt like I almost had to carry the conversation with this guy. Seems like he knows what he’s doing, though.

GoToSocial

In the realm of the less existential, last year around the time all my health problems started, I stopped posting anything on my official @ultrviolet@gts.endgameviable.com fediverse account, and eventually shut down my gotosocial instance.

Yesterday I migrated my gotosocial instance from an unraid server on my local network to a VPS up in the cloud, and turned it back on. It was easier than I expected, thanks to Antigravity doing all the research and writing a bunch of a scripts for me. I was able to restore a backup of my postgres database to the VPS and everything came up right where I left off on the unraid server.

I don’t use the fediverse much, but since I was wasting money on this VPS server anyway, I figured I might as well put something useful on it.

I continue to resist the pull of following people on social media, though. Mainly, resisting the pull of feeling like I’m friends with people who probably don’t know me and certainly care nothing for my feelings. After being away from that game for a long time, it feels a bit gross to go back to it.

My mental state is better when I approach people on the Internet as “coworkers” as opposed to “friends.”

Anyway, gts.endgameviable.com is back up, federating away.