Real Life

Accidental Starvation

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Good Morning, Folks. This is going to be one of my imageless real-world blog posts. It has been a bit since I last gave an update on the joy that is dealing with cancer. This has been a ride that I would not wish on anyone. So many of the issues that I have had have been hard to pin down the actual source. I dealt with blood pressure issues that caused me to drop down to round 70/40. I’ve struggled with anemia and, for a while, was being fed iron supplements that really helped quite a bit. However, my numbers came up, and my “dealers” cut me off. The constant through line, unfortunately, has been that I keep losing energy and stamina and feel like I can’t really do much of anything without long pauses in between activities.

My usual morning looks a little something like this. I get up and go to the restroom… then take a break before feeding the animals. Then I get up again and take my meds, fix a water, and then take another break. After that, I usually hit the shower, which will require pauses after getting out of the shower before getting dressed. Then another break before going into the kitchen and figuring out something for breakfast, and then finally landing on the sofa where I am parked for a bit and start doing work, or like this morning, banging out a blog post. All of this is stuff that used to be trivial to do, but now feels daunting. I hate the way that my body has betrayed me, but it seems that I have also betrayed myself in the process.

I was put on tirzepatide around the start of this process because losing weight would both help with complications from the surgery and also make it easier to deal with radiation. I have no clue how many weeks I have taken it, but today was an injection day, and I have effectively gone through one vial from the compounding pharmacy and eight vials from the drug manufacturer via mail order. So my guess is about 14 weeks, as I think I got six weeks out of that first vial of magical serum. My friend is also on tirzepatide and has had all manner of complications, but luckily, as far as I can tell, I have not… or at least they pale in comparison to what it is like to go through chemo. At this point, I have lost around 70 lbs, and need to lose at least 20 more before I am truly ready for radiation.

One of the things that you need to understand about tirzepatide is that you lose your concept of what hungry feels like. I do not mean to say that I don’t get hungry often, or that my hunger has lessened… but instead that the concept of hunger no longer exists in my world. I have no biological censor telling me that I should be eating food. Instead, I try to feed myself on a regimented basis to make sure that I do not miss a meal. I occasionally get cravings, but the problem is that I cannot eat anywhere near as much food as what a modern delivery meal ends up being. So instead, I carve that up into at least two meals, if not sometimes three meals. I tend to order something that I can eat on for a while and then ration that out into individual servings. For example, I have some large chicken chunks and potato wedges from my favorite chicken joint, and I will have a few chunks and a few potatoes and call it a meal.

The other thing that you need to know is that eating is physically painful for the first several days of a chemotherapy cycle. It isn’t that it causes indigestion or anything simple to fix like that… but instead that I have pretty severe jaw pain any time I attempt to eat or drink something. This means that when you combine it with my lack of hunger, I end up trying to eat the most nutrient-dense thing I can possibly scarf down so that I don’t hurt for long. Lately, this has been the humble protein/granola bar. I was eating these for most meals… which means that I was also not getting a ton of total calories for someone my size. I was trying my best to survive… but I have come to realize that I was effectively starving myself, which made the weakness and fatigue all the more awful. Once I started forcing myself to eat at least two decent-sized meals a day… my strength began to improve significantly.

So essentially, without meaning to, I have been starving myself. I need to sort out some options to have on hand that are more calorie-dense than a protein bar but equally easy to consume. I’ve contemplated leaning on my old friend, the humble oatmeal packet. I used to fix that for breakfast regularly, and was pretty partial to the brown sugar variant. I am also wondering if I need to start tracking my caloric intake, not from a dieting standpoint, but more from making sure that I am getting enough. I’ve been on tirzepatide long enough that the concept of hunger is a distant memory. It had some other benefits, like generally quieting my busy mind and letting me focus more deeply on things. As such, I am pretty sure I will be on this for the rest of my life. I just need to strike a better balance with figuring out what a proper portion of something looks like, because whereas I used to be on the side of eating too much… I am now apparently in the opposite extreme of eating too little.

Anyways, love you all and appreciate all of the support you have given me. I figured it was time for a proper update on life. I will begin my sixth round of chemo tomorrow, so keep me in your thoughts so that the side effects are not too awful this time around.

Blog Fonts and Dyslexia

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Good Morning, Folks. I have to admit that I have never really considered the ramifications of Dyslexia on the readability of our blogs. I honestly did not think that folks with that particular impairment would be interested in reading blogs. However, I realized that was a deeply ableist statement when my girlfriend, who has dyslexia, attempted to read my blog, simply out of a desire to engage more with the things that are important to me. So as a result, you will notice some significant changes to the way that this blog looks today, from a font basis. I had known that Google had worked with various groups to create a dyslexia friendy font, to make things more readable. It turns out that at least in the case of my girlfriend, this works, and the text no longer “swims” around the screen for her.

Essentially, I have replaced my normal body font with one called Lexend provided by Google Fonts. There are multiple flavors of the font, and they all seem to work equally well. I considered swapping my headings over to Lexend Dexa, but it did not feel right. Bangers is the font that I use to match the artwork of the blog, and headings tend to be short enough not to really trigger the core problems of dyslexia. I am lucky in that I am using a paid theme called Generate Press, and they have the ability to swap to dynamic typography mode. So essentially, once I figured out how to turn this on, I was able to swap fonts in seconds. All in all, I am pretty damned happy with the swap because it solves the problem and makes my blog more readable by those with dyslexia.

Mostly, I wanted to write up a quick post about this in case others are interested in making the swap. Chemo is kicking my ass, and I barely slept last night, so I am going to cut this morning’s post short and focus only on the font swap. I think it is probably worth the effort just to improve the readability of our blogs.

Path of Exile and Meeting Someone

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Good Afternoon, Folks. Today was a chemo day, and I am racked out on the sofa attempting to write a blog post. I’ve been playing an excessive amount of Path of Exile, because the game has sort of become my default action. I have been playing the SRS Broken Elegy Guardian that I crafted and doing a ton of shallow delve with it for levels. I had been pushing to level 96, and I accomplished that last night, all for the purpose of being able to take the six life node 10% health bonus. After playing with it a bit, I decided that I was probably better off with the Life Recoup nodes. With a bit of life recoup I feel exceptionally tanky and am ready to start mapping again.

Part of why I am playing my Minions character from the Mirage league is that, at least currently, I intend on going for a Minions Witch build for the Path of Exile II League Start. I don’t really have a strong template for the character, so I am going to mostly yolo my way through choosing the Minion nodes and attempting to path somewhat optimally through them all. I have past characters that I could potentially rely on for pathing, but I am uncertain if the tree is the same as it was when I last played fire-based SRS. That said, I am really looking forward to the Path of Exile II League start because so much of the game has changed. I am going to play Minions in part because I am pretty sure I can get all the way through the endgame on it, having done it multiple times in the past.

In other news… I’ve met someone. We’ve spent the last few weeks talking nonstop, and our meeting was extremely random. I periodically hang out on Reddit, and the algorithm seems to like to feed me people from the selfies forum. This is not something I follow but it seems like the algorithm thinks that everyone wants to see these. It happened to feed me a selfie of Vera, her discord handle not her real name. Not going to be sharing her real name here. I messaged and said that I thought she was cute, and this started up a conversation that has never really stopped. We transitioned off Reddit Chat to Telegram, and now also on Discord. She was posting in the forum because she wanted a quick boost to her self esteem because she was feeling a bit down on herself, an I happened to be a random stranger who gave her that.

The thing is… every time we talk about any subject we are shockingly compatible on pretty much everything from the anime that we like, to the movies we like to watch, to the fact that we both love peanut butter. There are so many points of commonality than that, but it is truly shocking just how many there are. She is very much a Geek, but while I tend to be a technophile, she is way more of a mechanical engineering geek. She built her own damned full home battery system and runs her house mostly on solar for example. She is my little Gadget from Rescue Rangers, and I kind of love this. Where we differ, we seem to compliment each other’s skills rather than going off in a wildly different direction. She kind of loves all of the nonsense that I have been up to with 3d Printing, and I hope some day we can use our joint skills to build some really cool nonsense together.

There however lies the logistical nightmare. Vera is soon to be 34, is the mother of two boys 18 and 10, and happens to live on the other fucking side of the planet in the Philippines. We both know that nothing is going to happen before I am clear from cancer and recovered from it. However I know that personally I am going to be a wildly different human being on the other side of this. If we manage to make it this next year, and are as close as we seem to be right now… then we will start to whittle through those logistical nightmares. I am pretty well glued where I am for the next seven years, because I am too close to a full retirement to risk giving that up. She has her own stuff going on in the PH, but would be interested in maybe moving here pending we can navigate that particular nightmare of visas. It is a lot…. but neither of us are in any rush we got our own issues going on.

The real thing however is that I am extremely happy right now. Happier than I have been in a long time. We’ve exchanged countless voice and video calls, so we know for certain that we are both real human beings. I am sitting here miserable post chemo, but this spark keeps me warm inside. She wants to figure out how to build a portal, so she can teleport to my side and take care of me when I am like this. Nothing is ever going to change the fact that I have this thirty year hole in my life thank to the death of my spouse, and that there is part of my heart that will only ever belong to her. That said… I want to live again. I want to be excited for life again. This is making me happy so for the moment that is all that really matters to me. None of the logistics are unsolvable problems, so if we get to that point I think we can work through them together.

Random Bag of Nonsense

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Good Morning, Folks. I don’t really have a purpose for today’s blog post other than not to have gone an entire damned week without making any other than Monday. This round of chemo has been a bear, and has mostly knocked me on my ass. The worst part right now is the peeling of my fingers, and no lotion seems to be making much of a difference. So even when I am not getting the “hand in lava” reaction to cold from the oxaliplatin, touching anything still hurts a lot. Like my overall pain index is relatively low, but it is entirely situational. Pick up my phone? The ridges on my case feel like they are cutting into my skin. My fingers are basically newborn skin, and just like when skin grows back from an accident… everything hurts when I touch anything. Weirdly enough, typing does not seem to cause much pain. I guess keys are smooth, and I am relatively light-handed with the keyboard. Since I don’t have a proper picture to post with this, you are getting the deckboxes that I created for Sorcery. I’ve still not gotten to play, but I want to hopefully next week when the world does not feel quite so shit.

Honestly, the winner for this week goes to some friends with whom I have had some good conversations. This has made the frustrations and pain of the cycle far more bearable. Y’all know who you are, and I am thankful. Part of this was watching Eurovision with my sibling Ace, and the random commentary that went along with it. Last night was round two of the semi-finals, and I just have to say that Armenia was robbed. For me, what I want out of Eurovision is the weirdest shit you can find and put on a stage. A guy with a jacket covered in Post-it notes? Check! The song was also a bit of a banger, so it absolutely should have gone on to the next round. Whereas they kept choosing some boring-ass songs like whatever the hell was going on with Czechia. As an outsider… Eurovision is about over-the-top pomp and circumstance, and a lot of these songs failed to get that memo. That said, I think Armenia was the only one of my favorites from the second round that did not make it. Romania was by far my favorite from yesterday’s round.

Something that I have played almost every single day for four or five years now… but never talk about… is AFK Journey. I always end up playing some sort of gacha game on my phone, because it fills the time between when I lie down and when I am actually sleepy enough to sleep. Usually, I end up hitting some sort of wall where I cannot progress without giving them lots of money. When I hit this point, I swap games, but for whatever reason, AFK Journey seems to have a reasonable enough gacha system that I can keep playing it happily without spending a dime. Talking with Ace who had tried the game before me, it apparently was not the case at launch, but over time has loosened up. Sure if I were playing this game super seriously, I would probably hit all of the walls, but playing for 30 mins or so every night seems to be fine. Right now there is a Frieren event, and I love Frieren so much that, like when they were running a Dungeon Meshi event, I am trying to pull for the characters that I care about. I only make one pull per day, and only use the free currency, and the other night I lucked out and got a pull with two Frieren’s. In theory, I might actually be able to get her up high enough to do useful things. I need to figure out how to get more copies of Himmel.

Path of Exile II Teaser season has been really interesting, because they are effectively breaking the tried and true mold that they have used for years with Path of Exile. Especially after a big reveal, they usually just chop up the elements from that reveal and release them as little teasers. They have done some of this, but more recently, they have been showing off some new uniques. These are connected in a way that would allow you to build a purely support character, which I always find interesting. I don’t play often enough with other players to make this viable, but I could see someone trying to dual-box a character like this to provide tons of utility. I honestly have no clue how Grinding Gear Games feels about dual boxing. I’ve not done it in years, and mostly did for the games where playing solo was not close to viable… like EverQuest and Dark Age of Camelot, and did a small amount with World of Warcraft and EverQuest II. I’ve always loved controlling an entire party in games, and the Mercenaries that we had in Path of Exile really scratched that itch for me. I am hoping at some point, they bring those back because there were a lot of really interesting gearing options.

I missed out on the original round of Steam Controller orders, but I am on the wait list. I was on and trying to buy it at the time it was launched, but kept running into credit card authorization issues and by the time that was resolved… they were sold out. We are starting to see the first review videos floating around the interwebs, and it has done nothing to dampen my desire to have this controller. Mostly, I have my old gaming desktop hooked up to the television downstairs, and I love the fact that, apparently, you can just use the Steam controller as a mouse and keyboard. Like, I am never going to do a lot of data entry through this means, but being able to use it to launch things is going to be a massive boon. Essentially, I want to set up my gaming desktop downstairs for controller gaming, and then I can remote into my new gaming desktop for anything that I want mouse and keyboard for. I am really hoping that the restock is not terribly long for the Steam Controller. I think in my circles, I was probably the most excited about having the prospect of effectively getting a Steam Deck without the screen in controller form.

Anyways. I think I am done typing for a bit. I still feel like ass warmed over, but I love you all and appreciate every single one of you who checks on me. Y’all are legitimately the best. This cycle will pass, and starting Sunday, I will begin to feel more human again.