Noise, good and bad
Posted on November 28, 2006
Filed Under All, Photos, My Brain |
The dawn sky was very pretty this morning as I made my way around the Stanford corral. I bumped into good dawn community friend Judy, who was kind enough to halt her jog and walk with me for a quarter mile or so. Judy is a lawyer and very organized: I don’t usually think of ‘Judy’ and ‘random’ at the same time.
But, random events, aka noise, are not necessarily bad things. The scene above, which some may find pleasing, captures many random events. The pattern in the high clouds, the trees, the sun, at a certain essentially random angle and moment create an interesting picture.
I’m going on about noise because it’s something I’m dealing with daily: I have better and worse days as I deal with brain cancer. I’d like to say every day I feel better than the day before: I wan’t progress, I want to be better every day. However, there are days, Sunday was one, when I just don’t feel very good.
I think this is sort of like a stock chart. If you look at, say, Apple, over time, the trend is clear. But if you’ve lived with the stock, as I have for some 12 years now, you know that there are better and worse days. It’s only over time that the trend becomes clear…
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. . . and when there is a solid plan being done to get uptrend - and a lot of top helpers.
[…] Yesterday passed without a single seizure and there were only 2 the day before. I had a very mild seizure early this morining, but the trend is clear, and hopefully will continue. We had a phone conference with Dr. Shih, UCSF seizure specialist late yesterday afternoon, in response to an emai I’d sent earlier in the day. The subject was Lyrica, a very new anti-convulsant that I’ve been taking. As the dosage has ramped up, I’ve been having problems with mobility (documented, not unexpected) and some other issues have arisen as well: the Lyrica documentation mentions, besides the drunken walking, that there can be, um, mental problems, as well. Linda asked me to leave the note up on the screen so she could add a footnote. Then she asked me, after typing for a few moments, how to spell ‘beligerant.’ Woops. Anyway, Dr. Shih has begun to back off the Lyrica, especially in the morning, when the problems are most apparent. The good news is the Lyrica (and 2 other anti-convulsants I take) have prevented a gran mal seizure, and reduced the once-painful focal-point seizures to relatively minor spasms and twitches. […]
[…] Difficult day yesterday, my left side was not cooperating and mobility took a hit. Dr. Larsen thinks edema - or swelling - of the tumor and surrounding tissues, a frequent side effect of radiation therapy, is putting pressure on motor neurons. This happened once before, after we’d ramped down the steroids, so we’re going to try another steroid pulse to see if I can get a little bit back. I understand that my progression won’t be linear, but days when things are neutral or good don’t stretch the coping mechanisms quite as much, for either me or long-suffering spouse… […]
RUBBISH !
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