Journal: News & Comment

Road trip!

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So now that I'm a cancer patient, I've been understandably a bit out of focus. Still getting work done, but I was far more cheered up (and distracted) by yesterday's Apple iPhone announcement than I had any good reason to be. (Chances that I'll buy an iPhone in the near future, when it won't be available in Canada likely till at least the end of the year and will cost $700 Cdn or something? Pretty damn slim.)

I'm also rather more psyched to be traveling to the NAMM Show in Anaheim next week as part of my first Inside Home Recording podcast road trip. And as of today, it turns out that trip will be way, way cooler than I was expecting even yesterday. I'll tell you about that in a moment.

I'm also quite humbled by the torrent of comments, emails, instant messages, phone calls, blog posts, and other support all of you have sent me. Really, my instincts tell me I don't deserve it—I'm not feeling at all ill right now, and chances are my doctors will be able to eliminate the early-stage cancer during my colonoscopy on January 24. There are many, many people worse off than I am now, so thank you for taking the time to think of me.

In part I may feel that way because I'm still not having a strong emotional reaction: I'm being very type A geeky analytical about the whole thing. Yes, it's cancer, but I'm in a very curable stage, and unless I hear differently from my doctors, I'm assuming it will be gone within a couple of weeks. If things are different, I'll deal with it at that time. I specifically asked my GP if there was anything I should do before my procedure, and he said no—take your trip, eat normally, do what you're going to do. And so I will.

I spoke to my uncle last night. He had a bad bout with colon cancer, much more advanced than mine, this past summer. Surgery, chemotherapy, awful bodily reactions to chemotherapy, huge weight loss, hospitalization, the whole eighteen yards. But as of this week a PET scan confirmed him as cancer-free. And he told me that he too dealt with everything emotionally much better than his wife and the rest of our family. I have to keep that in mind—those close to me are probably taking it much harder than I am. I'm feeling pretty good, but I know my mom felt physically ill when she heard the news, and that my wife feels fragile too.

I just want to take this little adenocarcinoma out from inside my ass and be done with it. I understand the physiology and anatomy of it reasonably well. I believe right now that we can excise it and annihiliate the pieces in the hospital incinerator, where those out-of-control cells deserve to go. I know I might not be that lucky, but I expect to be.

Anyway, the good news about Anaheim: this morning, as another snowstorm hit Vancouver, my wife and I talked about it and decided that we're pulling the kids out of school for a few days. She and they are coming with Paul and me to California, and my daughters are going to Disneyland for the first time next week. I'll try to join them for at least a day, but the NAMM Show is like Disneyland for music nerds, so we'll see which I prefer to do and when.

Screw you, cancer. We're going to Disneyland.

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