The Cry of "Wolf"

I had a few thoughts last night about The Boy Who Cried "Wolf!" - ways in which I hadn't considered the story before. Not surprising, since I don't usually engage in deep analysis of fairy tales unless required to by a teacher.

The story is told from the point of view of the boy. Makes sense, since the moral and warning are intended for people who would yell alarms too soon. But that means that the other dilemma in the story isn't addressed. After all, the villagers in the story probably don't want their shepherd eaten, even if he is an idiot from time to time, and they definitely don't want to lose their sheep - that's the whole point of putting a shepherd out there in the first place!

So what are the poor villagers to do when wolves are a real danger, but their only warning system gives them way too many false positives. How do you tell when the wolf really is among the sheep?

This is part of the dilemma we've been having with Dad W. He does have cancer; it's definitely life-threatening; it can cause a lot of symptoms, many of which aren't obviously cancer-related. But he's also a man who has trouble distinguishing annoying things one can and should push through from the medically dangerous. Up until just recently most of his symptoms have been the result of his poor condition and debilitation, rather than from the cancer. I've spent months muttering under my breath about the idiots down in the hospital in TN (the same ones who were treating Mom W. - isn't that reassuring?), who let him stay in bed for five days right after his biopsy. He lost huge amounts of mobility and muscle tone in those five days, and he never got them back. But instead of realizing how his lack of activity was contributing to his debilitation and pushing to get it back, Dad attributed it to the cancer, and his response to getting fatigued doing simple things was to rest more: which led to a downhill spiral of doing less and less as he lost the ability to do the things he had stopped doing because they were tiring.

So how do Rob and I as his caregivers figure out when his fatigue and immobility is self-induced, and we should push him to do more, and when it's really a sign of cancer progression, and we should drag him back to the oncologist?

This last couple of weeks, I think I'm seeing a cancer decline. Dad is deeply fatigued - he can spend 18-20 hours a day sleeping, not just sitting or lying down as he used to, but actually asleep. His skin tone is awful - a yellow/gray shade that makes him look like a walking corpse. He's running low-grade fevers more nights than not, sometimes with accompanying vomiting - and he doesn't wake up when he starts throwing up. He's nearly choked to death in the middle of the night twice in the last week. He's started hiccuping several hours out of every day.

Rob still thinks most of this is a continuation of his inactivity decline (except the fevers, but he thinks the failure to wake up, and inability to roll over when he's woken up are inactivity). He and Dad are still optimistic about what yesterday's PET scan will show. (Dad doesn't remember the night-time vomiting, and is having serious trouble tracking time, so he's not aware of just how much time he's spending asleep.) I'm not. I think we've finally hit the point, where if we hadn't tripped over Dad W's cancer back in the fall; if he had never had those five days of bed rest, and had maintained his mobility - we would be looking for and finding the cancer.

I think this time, the cry of "wolf!" is real. And with cancer in the liver, it's not usually long from a genuine cry of "wolf!" until there's not much left to do.

Woot! And Stuff

Robbie is now an orange belt! He did great on his test, a couple of minor hesitations in his first kata, all successfully negotiated, and other than that did everything within his belt requirements, and several things that aren't. There've been a lot of times I thought he'd never get here - especially when he decided to drop karate a couple of months after getting his yellow belt, but since he came back this fall, he's been putting in the effort, and it really shows. Congratulations, Robbie!

In other news, I'm still planning on going to the Nashville Isshinryu black belt only tournament, but I'm going to observe, not compete. I haven't sparred in a couple of months, my weapon katas are a mess (learning Urashi Bo has screwed up Tokumine, and Urashi itself isn't secure enough yet to be reliable, Chatanyara no Sai is nowhere near tournament condition), and regular kata is usually my worst venue. So rather than put the extra pressure on, I'm just going to go and hope to run into some of the people I trained with way back when.

Dad W. had a fall Sunday night. No serious injury, but he bruised up his side fairly well. My big concern is that he's wanting/needing (it's hard to tell with him) a boost to sit up on the edge of his bed now, and I'm worried that by the time the bruises aren't hurting him, he'll have lost the necessary muscle tone to sit up on his own. Experience with Dad says that once a piece of functionality is lost, he doesn't get it back. Plus, if he needs that much extra boosting, we'll probably have to ask for a different aide. Barb is lovely, but she's also 70 and barely over five feet tall - she can give him an extra boost, but she can't support any significant percentage of his weight - and for him to get up today required some serious heft.

Mom has an appointment with a local oncologist on Friday. She should find out then about probable chemo/radiation plans. For the moment she's continuing to heal well from the mastectomy.

Finally, anybody whose visited our house in the past will be happy to hear that Rob managed to fix the leaky tub faucet. It's been leaky since we moved in five years ago, but after trying to fix it, our plumber declared that it was sealed too tightly, and that fixing it would take $800 and breaking into the wall behind it. So we just lived with it. But this last week it finally got too bad to be ignored, and it turns out that the 6'6" guy who figures that he's got nothing to lose and possibly $800 to save, when working with a really big honking wrench, could knock the faucet loose and get in to repair it. I kept waking up last night wondering what was wrong, and then realizing that the house was silent, and I wasn't hearing the continual drip. Ahhhhh.

Where We Stand

First off, thanks to everyone for the well wishes and support. They are all much appreciated. I'm down at my parents' house right now, but will be heading back home tomorrow.

In good news, Mom is recovering well from her mastectomy. She should be able to get the drain out in a couple of days, which I'm sure will be a relief. Also, Dad W. likes the aide we found to help him while I was gone (I like her too). She's an older woman, but very bubbly and active (and likes dogs - a must around our place). Having her available should give me significantly msore flexibility for when responsabilities conflict.

The bad news is that several of Mom's sentinel nodes (5 of 11) showed positive, so there's chemo and radiation in her future. The exact plan hasn't been decided upon yet (we're awaiting a call from the oncologist), but regardless, it's not the news we were hoping for.

Bits and Pieces

Mom is scheduled for a mastectomy on Friday. It looks promising that she may not need chemo, but we won't find out until they dissect the sentinel nodes during the surgery. The current plans are somewhat fluid, but most likely I'm going to be driving up to pick her up and bring her back here initially, and then either I'll drive her back home (she's having surgery three states over from her home, but only one from me), or Dad will come up and get her. She and Dad are sounding much more like themselves now that there's a plan of action. My father does not like having a medical crisis that he can't do anything about, and I think that was a lot of why he sounded so anxious when I first spoke to him - they got the biopsy results late on a Friday, cancer is out of his expertise, and he couldn't really do anything until the following Monday - cue an anxious, out-of-sorts guy.

Dad W's oncologist has decided she's unhappy with how fast he's rebounding from his anemia (I.e. very slowly), and has decided to add an additional treatment to the Procrit injections he currently gets once a week. The new treatment will mean going to the hospital twice a week. I hope I can talk them into making one of the visits concurrent with his Procrit, or that's going to be an awful lot of time eaten up - getting Dad W ready to go out, out the door, to the hospital, treated, and then back home and settled takes about two hours, even though the hospital is ten minutes away.

I learned the end of Urashi Bo tonight. I'm liking this one quite a lot, but it's going to cause problems for the April 10 tournament I mentioned last time. Urashi Bo is too new for me to do a really good job with it - but I went back and practiced Tokumine no Kun today, and Urashi has also done a good job of making me hesitant with Tokumine - they're so similar in spots that it's confusing my muscle memory. So now I have to decide (and quickly!) whether to work hard on bringing Urashi up to snuff, go back to drilling Tokumine, or try to work up Chatanyara no Sai, which has languished the last month and is nowhere near ready. Great - fried brain is in no condition to make decisions! Don't make me make decisions!

In kidlet news, Robbie continues to do well with his flute, having put his sights on third chair (he started at sixth and is currently at fourth). If he gets up to second chair he's going to have a dilemma, because first chair is the girl he's had a crush on for the last three years. To celebrate his increased flute facility, I got him a book of flute and piano songs, with the promise (reinforced by my organ teacher) that if he learns one well, we can play it together for the offertory at church sometime.

Aaron is still running straight A's for the year (and is adoring having better grades than his brother). We should get the results back on his ISTEP tests in about a month, but everyone including his teacher and him thinks that he likely did very well.

Unfortunately, Aaron is very grumpy with lots of semi-meltdowns today because his shoulder started hurting him over the weekend and it's still bothering him. We took him to his pediatrician just as a precaution (mainly because he didn't do anything obvious to injure it, so we're a little mystified), and she gave us the expected advice - ibuprofen, heat, rest. Aaron is quite put-out. He expected the doctor to be able to fix his shoulder, isn't that what doctors are for?

And I decided a bad week and no husband deserved a small treat. So I bought myself a shawl pattern - Heere be Dragones. The same seller makes several other equally stunning shawls, including patterns of a Chinese Dragon of Happiness, a Pegasus, a Celtic Dragon, and a bird in a bamboo forest. However, I'm not a huge shawl knitter, so I restrained myself.

And that's the news down in Wood territory.

Dates

March 30th is going to be Robbie's orange belt test. Both Sensei and I have been very impressed by the way he's buckled downa and worked lately, and he's more than ready.

April 3rd is Dad W's next set of scans (at least the first bit - there are several scans involved). We'll see how much the two rounds on chemo/radiation have done. These are the scans that determine how we're going forward.

April 10 is a black belt only Isshinryu tournament in Nashville. Both Sensei & I are planning on going - and because he's still active and in the area, there's a reasonable chance that my first sensei will be there, and a near certainty that some of the local black belts that I knew from back then will attend. It would be very cool to be able to introduce my two sensei.

March 15th - my mom's first appointment with a breast cancer specialist, as she just had a biopsy come back showing two kinds of cancer. Fortunately neither is very advanced, but really the odds of two in the same place at the same time have got to be long. Weird versions of Doublemint gum commercials keep floating through my brain.

Those are the biggies for right now. I'm using a bit of freeware called Chaos Manager to keep track of various appointments now. It's a very apt name.

Money, money, money

I've been earning money this month. Weird that it should happen just when I'm already running in three other directions, but that's the way life is. Suddenly all of my potential income streams started producing small amounts at once. I got a paycheck for playing the funeral (which I hadn't asked for, nor expected), I've been commissioned to do some knitting, and I've got my first paying editing job. I'm most excited about the editing job, as editing is something I've always done for friends and family for free, not for pay.

I've been hired by a grad student whose first language is not English to edit her papers from now until through her dissertation. The rate isn't high, as she doesn't have a lot of money and I don't feel right about charging full professional rates my first time out the gate, but it's not rock bottom either, and it should be a small but steady income stream. Judging by the first paper, it should be rather fun too. She's a good writer with interesting ideas, but some significant English grammar problems. As opposed to the last friend I helped with editing, who was perfectly fine with grammar, but unfortunately just wasn't a particularly good or interesting writer. It's a lot harder to make a blah idea sound interesting than to clean up tense agreement.

Dad W's problems with fatigue are continuing. The weekly Procrit injection check showed a low-grade fever, low blood pressure, and his lowest CBC yet. His temperature is back to normal today though, so we may be over the hump. Radiation is Thursday, and I have no idea if they're going to keep him overnight or not. Unfortunately there's no telling until we see how he reacts to the procedure on the day. I'm beginning to wonder how much the radiation specialist is paying attention to Dad's actual condition, though. According to Rob, the doctor told him Dad should be walking a mile a day, which just is not going to happen any time soon. I would consider getting him to go once around the block a miracle. Up three houses and back is a good day. Fortunately his oncologist and the chemo guy both seem to be paying a little more attention. The oncologist started him on the Procrit, and I'm going to see if she's willing to send Dad to a PT the next time we see her.

Robbie may be having his orange belt test here fairly soon. Sensei started pretesting him last week, and says that if he can do a good run-through the next time they're both in class, then he'll schedule in the test. One of our older boys is getting ready for his green belt test, and the two of them may well test on the same day. L will be thrilled if he gets to test soon, as this will leap him ahead of his older brother and mother - up until now they've all tested simultaneously, but L has been here at least once a week since the beginning of the year, while the rest of the family has been skipping more often than not. They have good reason, but good reasons don't make up for missed class time.

Round Two!

Yesterday started Dad W's second round of chemo/radiation. They put in the chemo beads yesterday morning. They'll sit around and do their job for about two weeks, whereupon we go back and toss in the radiation beads.

This round is looking like it's going to be rougher than round 1. First of all, Dad W's condition has slipped somewhat since the first round, primarily due to being snowed in a lot, and a subsequent lack of motion on his part. If the weather is nice, I can sometimes get him to go out to the Y, or to walk a few hundred yards up and down the street (It really doesn't take much to count as "exercise" for him right now. Taking a shower is downright aerobic.), but if the weather is bad, getting him to move inside the house is pretty much a write off. Secondly, he's reacting more badly to both the procedure (they kept him overnight this time as he was vomiting and nearly aspirated a couple of times), and then to the chemo itself - he's been on pain medication most of today, when last time he needed barely any.

In ways both funny and alarming, Dad is also showing signs of intermittent confusion. Most of the time he's perfectly well oriented, but sometimes not so much. For example, earlier in the week he woke me up at 5am, demanding to know when I was going to start cooking dinner. He had woken up, and thought it was 5pm. I got him oriented and back to sleep, only to have him repeat the scene almost exactly twice more in the next two hours. I'm not sure if this is a reaction to the treatment, to the cancer, or something else (I know the procrit he's on can cause TIA's for example).

Poor Rob is a wreck right now. He flew in from his month out of country (he worked 24 of the 28 days he was down there, averaging 12 hour days), and arrived Thursday afternoon, only to have to get up at 4:30am to get Dad off to the hospital. Now the plant here is having internecine wars over who gets first dibs on him to fix their stuff. The curse of competency strikes again. OTOH, unless the plant is threatening to blow up, they will leave him alone tomorrow, or I will have something to say about it (to them, not to him). They lived without him for 28 days, they can survive long enough for him to have a day off.

I have survived my six weeks of being acting organist at church. R is back now, which is good, since I've blown straight through my entire repertoire. Last week we had a short notice (though not exactly unexpected, the lady was triple digits old) funeral, and I had to figure out how to hack my way through Jesu, Joy of Man's Desiring in four days. I am quite possibly prouder of making it through that piece acceptably, if not exactly in grand style, than I am of the other six weeks. I put in more than twenty hours of practice in four days, very nearly getting snowed in at church one night, when it started snowing just as I arrived to start practice - which would have been a rude shock to Dad and the kids when they woke up in the morning. When R gave me my assignments for my next lesson, he handed me a new piece with the following comment "Don't expect to have this down in a week, or even a month. This will be about a year-long project - it's about as hard as Jesu, Joy." Which just made my jaw hit the floor. Jesu, Joy is a year long project piece? And I just played it from scratch in four days? Holy crap!

In karate news, I'm finally getting back to practice regularly - between the snow and the family obligations, I didn't get in much in January. I've passed Chatanyara no Sai to Sensei's satisfaction (if not mine, it still feels very choppy to me), and he's started teaching me Urashi Bo. I have very mixed feelings about Urashi - on the one hand, it's a bo kata and I do love my bo. It's also got a lot of cat stance with a forward block, and that's one of my best stance/move combinations, making this an potentially excellent competition kata for me. On the other hand, it's an inherently choppy kata, without a smooth flow even when performed by the people who are acknowledged to be great at it, which I don't much care for. We'll have to see how I feel about it when I'm not stopping every other move to remember what comes next.

Also congratulations, Bill, on your orange belt in jiu-jitsu! I know I already told you on the phone, but thought it deserved reiterating here.