Student Visionary of the Year


Floyd's Student Visionary of the Year Campaign benefitting the Leukemia & Lymphoma Society has come to a close. His team, "Cancer's Collapse," took first place in the Golden Gate chapter. Thank you to everyone who contributed. You can read about the gala and more in this blog post.


Do you Have the Beatles White Album?


Blogging Tunes: Tangerine Dream - Rockoon.

It's funny -- funny ironic, not funny like a clown.  We're less than a week away from the two-year anniversary of my stem-cell marrow transplant - a.k.a. BMT.  At the one year mark, we tried to make contact with my donor, found out that he is not in the USA -- he's from Germany -- and were told that because it was an international donor, we have to wait two years to attempt contact via my bone marrow coordinator.

Doing the math I thought... ok, after Orion (my younger son) turns three (which he did on March 23rd), I can start thinking about making contact, what I'd want to say, how it all might go down, etc.

Alas, the irony of why the contact will have to wait. My lip biopsy from last week revealed a carcinoma in situ with suspicion of superficially invasive squamous cell carcinoma. The "in situ" part, if accurate, is actually good news -- it means that the cancer has not spread.  i.e. Stage 0 as described here.

But it's still cancer, and we still have to do something about it.  If it is fully contained -- "in situ" -- then the procedure will be relatively straight-forward.  Surgery to remove the affected area and then plastic surgery to clean it up.  If it's anything other than Stage 0, we have bigger problems than the Eagles' offensive line, the Flyers defense, and Doc Halladay's velocity.  Not going to waste any cycles thinking about that right now.

The doctor who took the biopsy was pretty surprised.  Not only didn't he think it was going to be anything cancerous, but type of carcinoma (on the lip) is extremely rare.  It's not even clear that it's related to my AML, other than the fact that simply because of the AML, I am at higher risk for skin cancer.  Though the sun exposure from last April (see this blog entry) combined with my compromised immune system certainly didn't help.

So while I was fully prepared to author my first blog post in three months, with the primary purpose of reporting on things like my joining the NCCN Foundation Board of Directors and attending the annual NCCN meeting, visiting friends & family in Philly for Carly Spike's Bat Mitzvah, planning a trip to Orlando for the LLS Volunteer Leadership Conference next month, and of course, posting some cute pics of the kids -- they just celebrated birthdays 5 and 3 -- I am now faced with the task of not only composing a blog post of an entirely different sort, but more importantly, preparing for imminent surgery (probably next week) and figuring out how to once again integrate (potentially) serious cancer treatment into my daily reality.

Another irony here is that I just finalized all of my vacation plans for the year: a trip to France in June for br's wedding, a week in Tahoe in the summer with the family (two Phish shows!), and a week in Philly for Thanksgiving (hopefully including Floyd's first Flyers game.)  Those three trips will completely exhaust my PTO, so if I have to take any real time off for this surgery/recovery, we're going to have to re-think everything.

Just wanted to get the word out, so no time for a bunch of pics and captions, though my Facebook friends can see a bunch more here.  That said, here's one of the boys with their cousin from last weekend:

Floyd, Lauren, and Orion

... a pic of Floyd the Grasshopper:

I'm a Grasshopper!!

...and a little movie of Floyd's first official Little League (T-Ball) at-bat:

Go Floyd!  Go Grasshoppers!

Dusting off my kicking cleats,

-jg

Comments

  1. Sending tons and tons of positive, healing energy...

    And lots and lots of love and very, very big hugs,
    Mom

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  2. one way or another...

    big hugs!
    hdd

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  3. Will being praying for a quick recovery!

    You can have some of my PTO (if that is possible)

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  4. If it needs ass-kicking: You. Will. Kick. Its. Ass.

    Praying it doesn't.

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  5. My prayers with you ....and YES KICK IT`S ASS... !!!!!!!!!!!!!
    .. we use to have a note of my son door "Cancer you not welcome, and if by any chance you coming back We all going to kick your ass, so stay out cs i know Karate"

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  6. Thinking of you, H and the boys, hoping this stays as straightforward as possible, and sending love. XOXO

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  7. That sucks, but you've got it covered. Love and prayers your way. Lots of love, Beeks

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  8. It all started with me researching a dev case I've been working on on your chatter wall and next thing I know I'm reading your entire blog history. inspirational would be the understatement of the decade.
    I wish you complete and speedy recovery. and happy pessach (and if I got it all wrong than make that Easter) to you and yours!

    Yael Perez (SFDC Colleague)

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  9. to reiterate amanda's comment..... wtf?

    love. prayers. healing. and of course humor.
    enjoy the 'and carcinoma' addition, if it has to be there, that is.

    xo

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