Forbidden Fruit

I really like this blog entry's title, but to explain why I will have to take a slight detour before I get to the main point of tonight's post. Bear with me.

When I was 15 or so I kept a "blog", only this was before they were called blogs. This was before LiveJournal, heck, it was before OpenDiary. I actually made my own online diary and didn't share it with anyone for a really long time, and it was incredibly helpful during the coming out process because it really let my friends know what I was feeling. It's ironic that I am so open and honest online (and was so even that long ago) when you consider that my area of expertise is now in privacy in Online Social Networks. After writing in my diary for years, my friend Kara discovered OpenDiary and we both started using that. Then I discovered a hole in their security that allowed me to steal anyone's password, sent them a helpful e-mail to let them know that they had a serious problem, and promptly got my account deleted. Including all of my diary information that I had, by that point, lost all of my local copies. That was my first experience with losing data in the cloud, so you'd think that I would have learned my lesson by now. Google has treated me well, though, so I'll continue to use their services.

Anyway, getting back to the title of this post, I distinctly remember that I used this title before in my old diary when referring to a straight guy that I had a crush on. (I still have crushes on straight guys from time to time, but I certainly don't obsess over them the way I did in high school, which is why you won't see such an entry in this blog.) I find the title of this post so funny because it applies very literally to my current circumstances.

Grapefruit.

I bought several food items from Bytes cafe -- the shop in A.V. Williams, the Computer Science building at UMD -- both this morning and this afternoon. Both times I grabbed a bottle of juice. The shop has basically four selections for juice that I would drink: orange, strawberry kiwi, cranberry, and grapefruit. I tend to favor orange juice and strawberry kiwi, but I get the other two occasionally. Or rather, I used to. One of the very prominent warnings for Gleevec is that I'm not allowed to have grapefruit in any form. You'd think it wouldn't bother me much, since I'm not really that big of a fan of grapefruit juice, but every time I open that refrigerator there I get this terrible craving for the drink that I just can't have.

Incidentally, there are a number of other things I'm not supposed to have, such as Vitamin E and St. John's Wort, but they're mostly easy to avoid (though I tend not to get Naked juice anymore, which is good for my wallet). There is one more thing: garlic. Garlic has been shown to (note: I'm paraphrasing from my understanding of the science behind it) affect the ability of the body to metabolize the Gleevec, so I'm supposed to avoid it as much as possible. This is of course nearly impossible since there's garlic in everything, so I've mostly stopped worrying about it. Grapefruit, however... I'm just going to have to suck it up.

As a final aside for tonight's post, even though I've been feeling great the past few days, I've had a few side effects. There's something strange going on with the pressure in my ears, and it comes and goes, but it's no big deal. I also have a little sore on the side of my mouth, and I had a nose bleed today. I was actually kind of glad for the nose bleed, honestly, because it confirmed my suspicions. I mentioned to Katrina on Monday that I was feeling great and jokingly said that I was thinking of cutting myself to see how quickly I healed (I think I freaked her out with that one a bit) because I suspected that my blood cell counts were trending toward normal. My nose bleed healed very quickly today, so I think my platelets are doing great. I feel like I have much more energy and that I'm more awake, so I bet my red blood cells are hanging in there too. And now I'm (successfully) fighting off the cold that Ted's trying to give me, so I think even my white blood cells are working! I'm actually kind of looking forward to my doctor's appointment next week after all, despite learning today how expensive my hospital stay really was.

I'll just say this: it cost more than I make in a year, and my health insurance is covering most of it, but based on my understanding of the statement from the health insurance company, it looks like I'll be expecting to pay a few thousand bucks. It's a good chunk of the money I've saved up over the past 8 years, but it's a small price to pay to take good care of my health.

Doctor's Appointment

Today was Thursday, and that means that it was time for an appointment. The appointments have been a little frustrating for me. Back in February my car died, so ever since then I've just used Zipcar to get around. This has worked very well for me; I can get to most places by foot, bus, or metro. However, I live in College Park, and the Greenebaum Cancer Center is up in Baltimore, about a 30-45 minute drive away.

It wouldn't be so bad to do with Zipcar, except Zipcar is pay-by-the-hour, and I spend a lot of hours at the GCC. My typical appointment goes like this. Someone in my family picks me up around 10 and I get to GCC about 15-30 minutes before my appointment time. I sign in, and then almost immediately get my vitals checked. Then I have to wait until my appointment time, at which time they draw some blood and tell me to wait in the other waiting room. And I wait, and wait, and wait, while they do a CBC (Complete Blood Count) test on my blood. Then I see my doctors, Dr. Singh and Dr. Rapoport, and they tell me that my blood counts are low but that that is to be expected. For a while, I would then have to go fill a prescription for Gleevec, but now that I've been approved for the patient assistance program the Gleevec is shipped directly to my house. Back when I had to wait for the prescription, I would be at GCC until 4:30, but now I'm "only" there until 3:00 or so.

The CBC is pretty interesting. I started out at 480 thousand white blood cells per millimeter cubed (which I will from now on denote as 480 WBC). They put me on Gleevec and Hydroxyurea (which is what most people think of when they think of chemotherapy), and that entire week at the hospital I dropped by about 50 WBC each day. I was at 70 WBC when they discharged me, and the next week I was in the normal range. Now I'm actually a little low, on white blood cells, red blood cells, platelets, you name it. Today they gave me a procrit shot to try to convince my body to make more red blood cells. Since my WBC is so low, they also gave me the flu shot and advised me to get the H1N1 shot when it becomes available.

Also today, we had a bit of a snafu. My brother came to the appointment with me, intending to get some blood drawn to test if he's a bone marrow match in case we decide to do a bone marrow transplant in the future. This of course confused the nurses --- they took his vitals, drew my blood --- in short they mixed up a lot of information and failed to take my vitals or draw his blood. They eventually corrected the mistake after Dr. Rapoport came into the room and jokingly mentioned that I had put on a little weight; at this point I told him that they never took my vitals, and then questioned how he believed the numbers he had in front of him. After all, I weigh about 150 pounds and my brother weighs 180, and I'd think it would be pretty unhealthy to put on 30 pounds in a week. In any case, we eventually got the matter sorted out. The thing I found so weird about it is that we knew there was some confusion, so we each checked the names on the sheets and they had Billy's name for the vitals and my name for the blood. Weird, huh?

Despite that eating up most of my day, I did manage to have a lot of good times today. In particular, I was one of the lucky "few" to get a Google Wave invite, and playing with that has been really fun. Though, Google Wave is all about collaboration, and my friend invites haven't taken effect yet, so there's not a lot to do with it yet. I did create a list of video games that I plan to purchase. I normally keep such a list in Gmail, and reply to the mail to update the list, so Google Wave really is exactly what I want for that. I will likely also move my "command line" folder to Google Wave, and probably share that with my friend Katrina as well. That folder is what I use to store useful command line calls that I would otherwise forget, and again, since I edit them and append to them, Google Wave seems like the perfect place.

Then, much later, I also managed to snag a PSP Go. I'm especially happy about this because NISA is having a 50% off deal on six of their games, five of which I plan to buy, this week only in honor of the Go's debut. Since I didn't own a PSP previously, the PSP Go is a great buy for me, especially now that I'm spending entire days at a time on the go waiting in GCC for my appointment with the doctors.