More Thanks and other stuff

Today's update will be pretty short, but pretty important as well.  I'd recently written about how my friend Dave will be riding in the Scenic Shore 150 Bike Tour for the Leukemia and Lymphoma Society.  His goal was to raise $1000 for this outstanding organization and as of today, he has reached that goal!  You can see his pledge page here, and below is a screenshot as of this blog post.

So, a HUGE Thank You to everyone who has supported him!   He sent me an email earlier today and I know it means a lot to him, and likewise, it means a lot to me.  For those who still wish to support him, definitely feel free.

THANK YOU!!

Other miscellany of today:

1) My line site is definitely healing up.  It is gross and crusty and itchy, but as one of my colleagues very wisely pointed out, better than weeping and oozing.  That's a great perspective and I was thankful for it.  I'm beyond worrying about this current site as a place for infection.  No word on what the next line plan will be, but I'm dreading finding out anyway.

2) I read a great article this weekend in Bloomberg Businessweek.  This is a magazine I've been getting in the mail (for free) for years, but the cover story of the current issue really grabbed my attention.   You can read it HERE:  Lessons of a $618,616 Death.  It is their cover feature, so it is slightly longer than average, but an unbelievably quick read.   It is not deep into business concepts, it isn't even deep into capitation concepts.   Briefly, the author explores some of the costs and charges of her husband's lasts years against the backdrop of his terminal cancer.  The reason I think this story is absolutely phenomenal is because it explains transparently without editorializing, which would have been so easy to do in light of our current health care debate.  In fact, I love her conclusion because it is so much more complicated than the talking points bantered about currently, and yet so much simpler.    I really hate to quote any of her conclusion here, because the article is so much better taken as a whole, but I do realize some are too pressed for time for the whole thing, so I will.   Reader's Digest background:  Her husband was found to have incurable kidney cancer which eventually spread to his lungs.  Both the author and the patient dove into heroic measures to save his life including clinical trials with experimental drugs.  Eventually, he died anyway, but his life was prolonged beyond typical expectation.

Looking back, memories of my zeal to treat are tinged with sadness. Should I have given up earlier? Could earlier hospice care been kinder? I hadn't believed Terence was going to die so I had never confronted any of those dilemmas. And I never let us have the chance to say goodbye.

I think had he known the costs, Terence would have objected to spending an amount equivalent to the cost of vaccine for nearly a quarter million children in developing countries. That's how he would have thought about it.

But when I ask myself whether I would do it all again, the answer is—absolutely. I couldn't not do it again.

The average patient on Flaherty's trial got 14 months of extra life. Without any treatment at all, Flaherty estimates that for someone with Terence's stage of the disease it was three months. Terence got 17 months—still within the realm of chance but on the far-right side of the bell curve.

Only I know that those months included an afternoon looking down at the Mediterranean with Georgia from a sunny balcony in southern Spain. Moving Terry into his college dorm. Celebrating our 20th anniversary with a carriage ride through Philadelphia's cobbled streets. A final Thanksgiving game of charades with cousins Margo and Glenn.

And one last chance for Terence to pave the way for all those other poor sonsabitches.

Businessweek's back page editorial on Health Care Solutions, by Clayton Christiansen, can be found here, and it is somewhat interesting as well.

3) A lego-project of epic proportions:   Last week I ordered myself a Bowflex from Amazon, because they had a much better price than anyone else.  This model seemed to get better reviews than the models on either side of its price point, and there are tons of exercises you can do.  I thought it would be a decent complement to my time on the trainer.  I hate weight lifting and haven't done it since HS football.  Still, I've kind of been intrigued by Bowflex for years, and I expect this will be a decent way to maintain some strength through chemo, and hopefully burn enough calories to make room for the candy and sweets I so love.  But reading the assembly manual leads me to believe that it'll probably take me a week to put the eleventy-billion pieces together.  I cannot even imagine how they got it in this box.