another oncological update and my vegetarian rumspringa

waiting to get zapped with xanax eyes. radioactive.

two weeks ago, i had another gamma knife procedure.  this time, i was ready for the pain of the torquemada frame. last time, i wasn’t and i ended up asking them to inject more lidocaine. the lidocaine is what causes the swelling in your face afterwards and doubling up last time really had me looking like i had been stung by bees, for several days.  this time i didn’t have a ton of swelling, which was nice.  this time, they zapped four tumors.  that includes the one that that was causing the blind spot in my vision so hopefully all that weirdness will resolve itself sooner rather than later.  i can see just fine, it’s just super annoying and basically comes and goes on it’s own terms. that’s 12 brain tumors total between the two gamma knifings.  marsellus wallace has been busy.

when you get a pet scan, they shoot you up with radioactive glucose and then you chill out in a room while your body starts to metabolize it. this is the door to the room. i was the radioactive material.

last week, i got another pet scan and had to wait until yesterday’s infusion appointment to talk to the oncologist and get his interpretation of the scan.  eight days is a long time to wait for that sort of thing, for sure.  however, reading the raw results from the radiologist seemed easy enough, so i wasn’t super worried that the oncologist would have a different opinion.  basically, the scan looked pretty good when compared against the previous one.  for starters, the lesion on my pancreas didn’t show up at all in this scan! i guess my immune system, all jacked up on nivo, is doing it’s job.  the tumor in my lung has a metabolic rate that’s just above background activity and the ones in my liver have had their rates reduced a good bit. there’s a new weird spot that lit up in my colon, but that could be a polyp or something.  i’m going to have to have a colonoscopy so they can get a good look at it.  what fun.  i’ll take these results, they show good progress and that’s exactly how the oncologist characterized it as well.

the infusion view; portland is beautiful.

i am still constantly tired, no matter how much sleep i get.  i am happy to be off the steroids again.  this last time, instead of prednisone, they gave me dexamethasone.  i was pretty hungry while on the prednisone, but the dexamethasone made me insatiable like a velociraptor.  i simply could not stuff enough food into my body.  even when i knew i was as full as a tick and about to pop, i was more, more, more.  it was almost as bad as the insomnia that came with the prednisone. also, it all went directly to my jowls, like 5 pounds of jowls in less than three weeks.  the radiation oncologist didn’t tease me about my frog neck this time around. maybe he knew what was up and was trying to be nice. i dunno.

i am more positive than ever, and still avoiding depression and anxiety.  i feel pretty good, y’all.

speaking of food, i have been a vegetarian of convenience for 28 years. what i mean by convenience is that i’m not one of those tv vegetarians that actually eats vegetables at every meal.  in fact, i eat a lot of processed food, like tofu, seitan, and cheese, and ultra processed stuff like beyond/impossible meat, tofurkey, etc.  basically what i am saying is that i’m a vegetarian, but i eat like shit.

i’ve never been *that* vegetarian, either.  the religious kind.  the dogmatic kind. the my diet is better than yours kind. first of all, like i said, i eat like shit and i’d feel hypocritical criticizing anyone else’s diet. and i’m never going to get on a soapbox and witness and testify about anything related to being a vegetarian (even if i didn’t eat like shit) because we are humans, we are omnivores, and we evolved to eat just about anything, just like raccoons. eat whatever the fuck you want and if someone gives you shit about it, fuck’em. or invite them out for a nice meal.

when i stopped eating meat in 1995, none of my friends or family could understand it.  they couldn’t understand it because up to the age of 25, i loved eating cheese and meat. a lot. like, a lot a lot. i was the proverbial meat and potatoes guy.  give me a cheese burger and fries, a pot roast and some mashed potatoes, cincinnati/louisville chili, pepperoni pizza, canned oysters, tuna and mayo, or a quart of deep fried chicken livers and i was pretty happy.  growing up in kentucky, it was common to have three different kinds of pig for breakfast. i loved all of it. especially my mom’s pot roast. she could really cook.

the understanding got even worse when i was a strict vegan for 13 years. “why don’t you eat honey? the bees don’t die.” my mom asked, “because it’s an animal product” i replied. she continued not to understand it, but she was also super supportive and it led her to a lot of recipes she’d have never tried otherwise; recipes my pop wouldn’t try if his life depended on it.  he was a meat and potatoes purist and would refuse to eat a pork chop if it didn’t have a handle. 

when carol and i got married, we had  the dinner catered by a local ethiopian restaurant, but we made sure to get a special burger and fries meal for pop.  he loved it and did not try *any* of the ethiopian food.  my dad was consistent as fuck, even when he was in the early stages of alzheimer’s.

i bet we were all thinking about white castles and sheet cake.

i’d say if there was one thing that my whole family could agree on, it’d be white castle. it was definitely our goto fast food joint when we’d make the trek from bethlehem to louisville. by the time i was in my early teens i had worked my way up to eating 20 at a time. white castle burgers are notorious for making people “sick,” ie giving them the runs, etc. that never happened to me, no matter how many of those tasty little oniony burgers i would devour.  until i was 25 that is.  when i lived in cincinnati, i had a little ritual for the drive home to see my parents.  on the way out of town, i’d stop for gas and get a cold two liter of mountain dew and the biggest bag of doritos i could find and then hit the drive thru at white castle and get bag of 20 burgers; no cheese and no fries, when it comes to white castle, that shit’s just unneeded filler.  by the time i’d get home to bethlehem, roughly 2 hours later, i would have consumed it all (to be fair, i probably ate at least five of the burgers before i crossed the ohio river into kentucky).  mom would always have dinner on the table, too.  sometimes hamburgers (she’d broil them and they were fantastic), sometimes louisville chili, but usually a pot roast and mashed potatoes. and then i’d eat that full meal, too.

and then it happened, i got the dew, the doritos, the white castles, and the shits.  i felt so bad when i got home, i couldn’t even eat the pot roast mom had made. a month later, it happened again. for the first time in my life i thought “i wonder if i could be a vegetarian for a bit.”  this idea hadn’t come from nowhere, i was in grad school at the university of cincinnati and surrounded by tons of people from other countries and other cultures, many of which were vegetarian by default.  part of the allure was simply the idea of self restriction.  other than giving up candy for lent a few times in grade school, i never self restricted my food before. i saw it as a learning opportunity.  i could research other cultures thru their food. over time, i learned a lot about foods and diets from various countries, cultures, and religions. indian food and ethiopian food and afghani food and persian food and chinese food.  i learned a lot about the kosher symbols on food packaging that makes it super easy to tell if something has eggs or dairy in it.  the kosher symbols were a huge help while i was vegan.  

btw, i stopped being vegan about 15 years ago when carol seductively licked some soft cheese off her finger to get me to join the dark side.  i joined and my guts were wrecked for at least a week.

anyway, in the beginning, it was about restricting my diet. over time, as i figured out how easy it was, the reasons morphed into not wanting to eat animals because i didn’t actually need to, to not participate in factory farming (there’s no real way out of this, even as a vegetarian/vegan), and finally to just “i’m a vegetarian, i don’t need a reason.” all of which brings me to my current moral quandary, my vegetarian rumspringa.

in case you’re not familiar with rumspringa, in a nutshell it’s when amish teens are given some time and freedom to choose whether they want to be baptized as amish. they’re allowed to experience the outside non-amish world. some of them leave the community, and “dress english”, watch tv, drink, do drugs, have sex, etc. rebel like teenagers, basically.   and that’s kind of where i am at with my vegetarianism right now.

in-law meat facilitators in bend.

back at beginning of this whole melanoma ordeal, it was suggested that i might want to get some alternate sources of protein onboard. i started with some tuna and mayo, my favorite thing as a kid.  as a teen playing football doing two-a-day practices and lifting weights and working on the farm, i’d eat 2-4 cans of tuna a day. i still like it.  i tried some chicken, too.  i’ve never been a huge chicken fan, and that still holds. when we were in bend a while back with my in-laws and i was still on the dexamethasone, let’s just say i consumed a lot of meat.  ham for breakfast; sausage, kielbasa, and pork shoulder at a german place.  i ate to the verge of being sick at just about every meal (i am so relieved to be off the steroid and back to my normal level of hungry). i was bumming bites off everyone’s plates.  i’ve had pork chops (with handles, pop!) and fries at a greek joint.  my friend greg and i have been having trash food dates.  we went to long john silver’s, and it was awful.  maybe because it was a combo taco bell / long john’s, but probably not.  we went to arby’s and it was ok, but you could put horsey sauce on anything and it’d be good. next, we’re going to a&w.

so that’s where i’m at now.  occasionally eating some meat, getting infusions, getting good pet scans, and getting gamma knifed.

the chili epilogue

louisville and cincinnati chili is very different than what i think most people think chili is, definitely when compared to southwest chili.  first, there are only a few ingredients for louisville chili: sautéed onions, garlic, and ground beef, diced tomatoes, kidney beans, salt, chili powder, and spaghetti noodles and topped with cheddar cheese; the noodles are cooked in the chili and soak up all the chili goodness.  cincinnati chili is basically the same, but they add chocolate and cinnamon to the spices and they serve it on top of the noodles. cincinnati is serious about it’s chili.  there are like 4 different local chili chains and several one off chili joints.  that was one of my favorite things about living there. personally, i make an amalgam of the two by adding chocolate and cinnamon to louisville chili. yum!

the vegetarian rumspringa adventure continues.

me and my jowls waiting to get infused.