Home Again

Dad is home again.

The new calf was not with its mama at the water trough this morning. Its absence is concerning because calves born this time of year often do not survive the heat. Chris and I searched for it in the grazer. We finally found it hidden among the tall stalks. It didn’t take a lot of herding to get it back with mama.

When we got to the hospital, Dr. W had already released Dad to go home. Two bits of really good news: The abdominal scan revealed no metastasis, and Dr. W. says dad has “a long time.” Combined with the medical news, the news about having a new calf made it a great day for Dad.

Shortly before lunch time, we were ready to roll. On the way home, we passed a Victoria county sherif trolling for tickets. He was driving a dirty pickup truck with a tool box and a headache rack—not lights on the roof. Only the logo on the door identified him as a cop. Sneaky bear! I wonder if he has trouble getting people to pull over because of the lack of identification. These are paranoid times, but paranoia has survival value.

Dad was almost himself by the time we got back to the farm, and the calf was still with mama at the water trough—very shady and cool there. I went into Yorktown to get prescriptions filled while Dad napped and Chris got ready to drive to Tildon for work. As I was pulling into town, Chris called to let me know Dad has a second calf. There was a new white faced calf to go with the brindle calf we found yesterday.

Another new calf to brave the August sun

Back at the house, Dad was feeling good enough to go through several of his standard rants: business, lawyers, politicians, and the decline and fall of the US at the hands of greedy Republicans out to destroy the middle class. I let him rant. It is good to see him with that much energy.

He is stronger today, able to move around enough to take care of himself. He still doesn’t have much appetite, but he is eating about as much as before the procedure.

A Little Better

The newest calf in Dad’s herd

Chris and I arrived at the hospital after Dr. W. had come in to talk to Dad. We were running late because a bad mama cow had come up for water without her baby, and we took a while to find it in the grazer patch and drive it back up to the shady water trough where the cattle like to hang out during the heat of the day. The last thing we wanted to have to tell Dad this morning was that we had lost his new calf.

Dr. W. had told Dad he had to stay another night in the hospital. Dad took this news with surprising aplomb. The he told us the CT scan had revealed no metastasis. Dr. W. says Dad has “a long time,” whatever that means. While I know he can’t predict the future, I’m much happier with “a long time” than I would be with “a few months.” Or less.

Some of the 23 bales of hay that awaited our return to the farm

By late afternoon, I was glad that they were keeping Dad another night. He woke up from his afternoon siesta in a very crotchety mood. He was down on everything. Yesterday’s surgery and a lack of deep sleep had caught up with him. He was too weak to get out of bed without help (never mind that he is 89, and many his age have trouble like this without the excuse of surgery—or cancer). He went through a litany of all things the medical profession had done to ruin his life. Then he got started on lawyers.

I hate it when he is unhappy like this. His pain pains me, too. So, I try to find something positive to say, but he wasn’t having anything to do with that. All I could do was sit quietly and listen without comment until he wore himself down. When he returned from a long phone call, Chris finally got Dad turned onto happier subjects.

We left shortly after dinner because Dad was tired and wanted to turn in early. We got back to the farm to find 23 round bales of hay had been baled in our absence—not bad for a 20 acre paddock being grazed by nine head.

…Just Not Today

Chris and Jim wait with me for Dad to wake up. This is very stressful for all of us, but Jim wears the strain more publicly.

I am at Citizens Hospital—now called Citizens Medical Center because it has expanded so much—in Victoria, Texas because Dad is having another probing session with Dr. W. It has been scheduled for months, but I don’t like taking chances by not being here.

I drove Chris and Dad in for the 06:00 appointment, which is an hour earlier than usual. (All that meant was we had more time to wait before the actual procedure would start.) Jim and Waynette drove in from Angleton. I came in last night, which meant I missed Suna’s return from North Carolina, where she went to help Kynan drive back from a summer internship with Blue Cross/Blue Shield.

Once they finally got started about 8:30, the procedure went a little longer than the expected hour. Dr. W. gave us the news in a small office off the waiting room. The tumors have continued to grow and now take up almost the entire volume of the bladder. He was able to resect much of the tumor on the left lateral wall, but the one on the right was too hard to cut. He had spent the extra time trying to clear as much of the tumors as he could.

He said Dad needs more radiation, but the radiologist says Dad has already had all the radiation he can take. Dad has already reacted badly to the milder form of chemotherapy available for this type of aggressive cancer. The remaining chemotherapy option probably won’t extend his life but would be seriously detrimental to his quality of life. Dr. W. wants to perform a CT scan tomorrow morning to see if any metastasis has occurred.

We all agree that whatever happens next is Dad’s call. Our only concern is to make the remainder of his long life as happy and comfortable as humanly possible.

It took longer for Dad to come out of recovery than we expected, too. Waynette and I began to worry that the delay might be caused by a recurrence of the painful bladder spasms that he experience on a previous procedure. Turns out we were right. That level of pain takes a lot out of Dad. We got him up to his room and went to lunch to allow him to sleep off the anesthesia in peace.

After lunch, we stayed in the waiting room until he woke up. Jim and Waynette went back to Angleton. Chris and I stayed with Dad to wait for Dr. W. to come by. When he did, he was more optimistic than he had been immediately after surgery, just not much. I can’t imagine what Dad is going through right now.

We stayed with Dad until his normal 21:00 bed time. We didn’t talk much on the way back to the farm. What is there to say?

Everything Is Kinda Alright

Dad at Christmas

Everything is kinda all right

We gonna make it through the long night

And everything’s gonna work out all right

Long as we keep a-movin’ on

—Charlie Daniels

I should have posted about this a while back, but I’ve never been that good at keeping up with my journals, even though I keep starting them.

I chose the title of this post from the Charlie Daniels song quoted above because that is how I feel after talking to Dad on the phone this evening. It’s not great, but some times all right is all you get…or need.

The picture of Dad is from our trip to see him at Christmas. This picture and many of the recent ones bring a different song to mind.

Well, to me he’s one of the heroes of this country

So why’s he all dress up like them old men?

—Guy Clark

That’s not how he sounded when we talked. And that’s not how I feel tonight.

Dad is now almost through with his radiation therapy. Because they’re irradiating the same general area as when he had colon cancer, he can only take half of what the radiologist said he would normally do for bladder cancer. Dad seems to be tolerating the therapy very well. Today was the first time he complained of any side effects, and those are not beyond the pale of his normal range of symptoms.

So, I’m reasonably optimistic. Dad is in good spirits and has some goals set. They aren’t as long-term as he once set, but they are very reasonable for someone pushing 89. I am very pleased that one of them is to reach 90. When he accomplishes that, he can set some more. As he noted today, “You have to have goals.”

On a completely different note, Suna and I had dinner tonight with Tubaboy and his girlfriend, who has a vaguely Princess Di-ish look to her. (She is a very sweet girl from Montana.) She used Tubaboy’s kitchen to prepare an eggplant primavera. I was really surprised at how delicious it was—not that I had any doubts about her culinary capabilities; it was the eggplant part that bothered me.

After dinner, we walked around campus and visited Tubaboy’s roommate at work. On the way home, I saw a huge gray fox run across the street. Now I know why the dogs have been in an uproar the past several nights.

Thanksgiving at the Farm

Here’s the reason we changed directions after two hours on the road. This is Dad's fun. It's also what keeps him alive. The field that burned is now one of the greenest parts of the farm. Tiny shoots, but green.

We went to see Dad for the Thanksgiving break. Full details are in the Ursula blog, so I just want to focus on how Dad is doing in this post.

We got to the farm at about 21:30—long after he had gone to bed on Wednesday night. By 09:30 on Thanksgiving morning, he was out in the fields. He took a couple of hours to rest mid day, and went back out to plow for several more hours. I estimated six hours in the tractor on Thanksgiving Day.

He worked even harder on Friday and finished his plowing on Saturday, just before the sky spit for a while but refused to settle the dust. So while he doesn’t have the stamina he did when he was a young man of say 70, he is doing great for someone who is pushing 89 and fighting cancer.

The only down news is that he seems to be trying to convoke himself that the doctor won’t be able to resume treatments on Monday. He says he may tell the doctor he doesn’t want to continue with the treatments.

On the other hand, he continues to set goals and work to see them accomplished. I’m hoping his pride and determination win out over his pessimism. To use his favorite phrase, “We’ll see.”

A Quick Update

Since I don’t have a picture of Dad’s face when he got the good news, here’s one of my brother Edwin, me, and Dad. I think it was taken sometime in the mid 1800’s.

The test results came back with good news. Dad’s cancer had grown, but it was only on the surface. Given that this is a very aggressive form of cancer, the doctor said its limited growth was a very good sign that the treatments are working. He went on to say that he thinks we can beat it if we increase the testaments to every week (which is what he originally said he wanted to do but never scheduled them more often that every two to three weeks).

…Home Again Hippity Hop

The first thing we did was rebuild the fence Chris knocked down while saving what he could of the hay crop. We also hung two new gates by the driveway so Dad can let the cows out to graze in the fields after harvest. Here’s the “Hippity hop” part of the title. Suna told Chris she wanted a picture of me This was the best we could do given the glare on the cab plexiglass.

Dad was feeling much better this morning, but he was still willing to listen to reason with regard to following the doctor’s orders. Instead of insisting on doing the work himself, he sent Chris and I out to hang gates and plant fence poles.

I drove the tractor while Chris did the brain work on the ground. He made sure the posts were aligned both along the fence and vertically. I would guide the front-end loader over the post and push it in the ground using the flat on the bottom of the pivot.

While planting the posts, we managed to scare up a bunny nest. I clipped one little guy’s left leg, but he seems unhurt otherwise. We took him back to the house for Dad to nurse back to health. He’s very friendly and seemingly unafraid of anything. Might be why they didn’t run from the tractor soon enough.

Later Chris found a pile of fur he thinks was their mom. She had been gone a week or so, which gives us hope that the little one we rescued and its siblings will survive OK.

By the time I had to head back to Austin, we had planted 61 posts and hung two gates. Dad was feeling “better than since before May” when he was originally diagnosed with cancer.

Home Again…

Moon rise and lens flare over the farm with a little hand-held jitter

Chris and I got to the hospital this morning about five minutes after the on-call doctor made his rounds and told Dad he was good to go home again. This was after the floor nurse last night told us the on-call never released patients on the weekend, and we would have to wait for Dad’s regular doctor to return on Monday. Luckily, they didn’t get the release paperwork ready until after they served him lunch, so we weren’t in trouble for making Dad wait.

Have I mentioned that he hates hospitals. He says, “If you say in a hospital long enough, they’ll kill you.” So there is nothing that would have made him madder than having to wait on someone to get him out of there.

We got him home, and he decided he wouldn’t push the doctor’s orders again. He laid down and slept most of the afternoon. We watched Lawrence Welk, and he went to bed. So did we. It’s been a long one.

Cancer and John Deere

Dad and Chris discuss farm things while we wait for Dad’s new John Deere to be delivered. This should have been our first indication of what kind of day we were in store for. The smoke the driver is pointing to was actually on the other side of Cuero—more than 20 miles away The driver carries the Slow-Moving-Vehicle placard to install on Dad’s new, larger tractor while Dad wanders over to kick the tires. Chris points out something about the tractor controls as Dad moves hay. Chris buries the last of the burning hay after the fire is contained. At lest the sunset was spectacular. Maybe it was just a new appreciation of the sunset. After a long, stressful day, Dad concedes we need to take him to the Emergency Room.

This date was supposed to be an auspicious one for weddings, movies, and other things. It certainly turned out to be eventful.

I got a call the day-before-yesterday that Dad’s cancer had returned. Chris had taken him in for some tests, and they were going to keep him over night. There was a lot of anxiety and gloom in the message. The doctor felt it safer to err on the side of pessimism. I told Suna and my boss that I would do what I needed to do to tide my work project (a conference call with Singapore and some paperwork) for a few days. Then I would head to Yorktown to hear from the doctor first-hand what was going on.

It turned out that I was at the office until after 21:00, so I didn’t head out until work-time yesterday. I got the hospital just after the doctor made his rounds and determined Dad could go home. The prognosis was still very pessimistic, but Dad was chomping at the bit to get home to his cows. So we headed that direction. We did get him to eat at Whataburger on the way. He slept most of the afternoon, and we all went to bed early.

The big deal for this morning was that Dad’s new tractor was being delivered. He was excited, despite being tired and complaining of problems with his catheter. Some minor adjustments, and he said everything was good. So we went outside to wait.

Dad couldn’t stop talking about the new tractor. He listed all of the features it had that the old one didn’t. He was especially proud that after using the old tractor for three years, the dealership offered him a thousand more in trade than he paid for it to begin with. When it arrived, a huge smile broke through the fatigue covering his face.

The driver unloaded the new tractor and got it set up while the salesman talked with Dad and Chris about a spreader Dad wanted. It had been laying in the yard for almost two years and had accumulated some sun damage, which resulted in some small breakage around the edge. Dad finally agreed to take it as-is for the price the salesman said he couldn’t reduce.

After they left, Dad was agitated that he couldn’t play with his new toy. Chris and I finally gave in. We decided that if he left it in turtle mode, it wouldn’t be any rougher than riding in a car. Dad climbed in to the cab. You could feel the joy radiating out of that tractor as he moved the eleven bales of hay that comprised the total output for the year. The drought hit hard, even though Yorktown has had more rain than the Hill Country.

After the hay was all lined up neatly along the fence, Dad wanted to hook up his disc so it would be ready when he was able to work the fields. That’s where the trouble began. The bold that forms the top pivot of the three-point connection was rusted solid. A spark from cutting that bolt loose set the grass under the implant alight. The fire spread quickly as dry grass fires are prone to do.

Neighbors were showing up to help within just a few minutes. The woman from across the road got Dad to sit in her pickup while Chris and I, soon to be joined by others, fought the fire as best we could until the fire department arrived. We may have had it mostly contained, but we would not have been able to hold without the massive amounts of water they could dump—much more than the puny water hose I was using.

All-in-all, we lost only a couple of acres of dry grass, but we lost half of the hay crop. We would have lost it all if Chris hadn’t driven the tractor through the fence and pushed the unburnt bales into the empty field across the driveway. Chris showed he could make the tractor dance while fighting the fire. The house was unharmed as were most of the implements. Two of the rubber wheels on the planter melted, as did the valve stem on a tire that must have been 20-years-old. Very little damage indeed considering the potential for disaster.

After Chris finished burying the last of the burning hay, we went inside and ate some pulled poke tacos for dinner. The meat came out of a plastic tub. The tortillas were store-bought, and the cheese was the lowest-price sliced variety at the store. It was delicious.

Then Dad said he thought we needed to go to the emergency room. His doctor was out, but the answering service said to have the ER nurse call his on-call when we got there. It turns out that the anti-clotting medicine they had prescribed for Dad causes the clots to become gummy, and one had plugged the catheter, causing Dad a lot of pain. They decided to keep him over night to make sure all of the clots were cleared out.

A Cup of Statistics

As this hoodie (available on Cafe Press) suggests, we should always be aware of risk. Relative statistics do little to help us evaluate the risks we take.

Here is the text of the speech I delivered today at Toastmasters. It is a bit of a ramble because I procrastinated and didn’t have time to apply sound instructional design to it. I also tried a physical ending, which confused at least one member of my audience.

The speech ran a little long, so I’ve marked some of the text for removal if I ever deliver it again.

Mark Twain may have said it best. “There are three types of liars: liars, damned liars, and statisticians.” In his 1952 classic, Elementary Statistical Analysis, Harry Hartkemeier says Twain implies that statisticians “have reached the superlative.” There is no better liar than a statistician.

But as much as we distrust statisticians, we all love to bandy numbers to support our points. I’ve heard that as much as 67.8% of all statistics are made up on the spot.

We love numbers, but we believe them only when they support our views. Why is that?

Have you ever deliberately falsified the numbers to support your claims?

Do you know someone who has?

Yes, we’ve all read about sloppy scientists who have [falsified the data]. We may know someone who has. We may even have done so occasionally ourselves, as with my reference to the percentage of impromptu statistics. Actually, less than half of all statistics are made up.

So why don’t we trust statistics?

• They don’t seem to yield any useful information.
• They are often contradictory.
• They’re almost always confusing.

And speaking of statistics made up on the spot… Photo source: Dirt & Seeds

Like many on the right, I blame the liberal media. And like many on the left, I blame Fox News.

The media has become fixated on numbers. Statistics make sloppy reporting sound more credible. And in the drive for audience, they focus on one type of statistics above all others—relative statistics.

Now you won’t be able to find a textbook on relative statistics. It isn’t a real branch of the actual science. That comprises:

• Descriptive statistics, which summarizes data by describing what was observed in a sample
• Inferential statistics, which uses patterns in the sample data to draw inferences about the data

Inferential statistics is most often used in scientific research looking for a correlation between two variables.

And that’s where we begin to get into trouble. The first problem is that people unfamiliar with the scientific method confuse correlation and cause even though the first thing you lean in Intro to Statistics is that correlation does not equate to cause. Correlation does not equate to cause.

Early in the century, two separately reported studies told us that people who drink more than four cups of coffee every day have:

• A 40% increased risk of colon cancer
• A 40% decreased risk of heart disease

Sounds like a wash, right?

But increased and decreased risk are relative statistics. Even saying that something increases your risk of dying by 100% doesn’t give you enough information to make an informed decision.

• If choosing one behavior over another increases your risk from 1/1B to 2/1B, that is a 100% increase—but not much of a risk.
• If it increases your risk from 1/1000 to 1/500, it’s still a 100% increase. And it poses a much more immediate risk.
• But even in the second case choose one behavior or the other won’t ensure you to live or die.

Another way relative statistics causes problems is that the media may only report one side of the equation. NaturalNews.com reports on a study in Archives of Pediatrics & Adolescent Medicine saying that women who take antibiotics during pregnancy are significantly more likely to deliver babies with birth defects than those who don’t.

• Mothers of children with a fatal skull and brain malformation were three times more likely to have taken a sulfa drug than women whose children did not have the defect.
• Kids with cleft lips or palates were twice when mothers had taken nitrofurantoins, which were also linked to congenital heart defects, eye defects, and being born missing one or both eyes.
• Penicillin was associated with a higher risk of a kind of limb malformation.

The report fails to mention what these women were being treated for. We have no information about whether the conditions the women had could have similarly damage or even killed the fetuses. We do know that if the disease had killed the mother, the baby would not have had a birth defect.

The media loves to report relative risk because phrases like “100% increased risk” or “three times more likely” or “half as likely” get your heart going. They scare you. They make you want to pay attention to what the reporter says.

And about coffee: it turns out coffee may reduce the risk of colon cancer by speeding the passage of carcinogens through your gut. Web MD says the decreased risk of heart disease ranges between 19%–91%—no descriptive statistics there.

But it does explain the mechanism of the reduction: antioxidants and anti—inflammatory compounds in the brew.

So the next time you hear about relative risk, know that the information is probably reliable but useless. Hearing the numbers should start your research, not make up your mind. It’s up to you to find out what the numbers really mean.

Oh, and now they say coffee also reduces your risk of Type 2 Diabetes. Who cares if the statistics are only relative? I’m going for another cup!

Not one of my best efforts. Maybe I’d give it a B.

Ideopathy

Thanks, Trackgrease. I wish life could have been easier for you, but then you wouldn’t be who you are now. At least, you learned how to fight the ideopaths.

Beneath the complexity and idiopathy of every cancer lies a limited number of “mission critical” events that have propelled the tumour cell and its progeny into uncontrolled expansion and invasion.

—Evan & Vousden (2001)

I take today’s quotation from wordsmith.org’s word of the day. Wordsmith defines idiopathy as “A disease of unknown origin or one having no apparent cause.” From this entry, I looked for the word ideopathy, which I found in use but not on any of my favorite dictionary sites. It makes sense to define ideopathy as an idea or political movement that has become pathological. In this case, it fits the description of cancer that Evan and Vousden provide above.

Which leads to my decision not to vote in the Republican primary this year.

The other day, Suna got a recorded call from John McCain. In the recording, he promised to further the Bush administration’s attacks on the Constitution, fairness, and choice. He vowed to continue the war against science. While I realize McCain was probably trying to appeal to his rabid base, his (hopefully) disingenuous rhetoric convinced me that he is now owned by the ideocrats (read ideopaths) of the far right.

Perhaps Cthulu would be the lesser evil. Besides, he is the heir apparent to the Republican nomination. Voting for him in the primary would accomplish nothing.

That leaves Ron Paul, who has as much chance of being the nominee as I do. Voting for him would also be throwing away my primary vote.

So I am back to my usual course—voting in the Democratic primary—and my original dilemma. I still can’t decide which candidate to vote for. Clinton has the baggage that comes with experience. Obama has the vague optimism that speaks of inexperience. I still have a few days to agonize over this decision.

Grateful Monday

So that is what I am grateful for today. I am grateful that I live in a country where I can agonize over such a decision and speak publicly about that agony without fear of repression or reprisal—at least not yet.

And I want to thank Trackgrease for doing his part to help ensure that I have something here to be grateful for. He served four years in the Army and eight years in the National Guard. The operative word here is served. He was not an officer or a decision maker. He simply did what he could to put his nation’s safety and health above his own.

Let us all do what we can this year to protect and serve our democracy. If nothing else, vote. As Edmund Burke said, “All it takes for evil to triumph is for good men to do nothing.” Let this be the year we stop doing nothing.

References:

Gerald I. Evan and Karen H. Vousden (17 May 2001). Proliferation: cell cycle and apoptosis. In Cancer. London: Nature. In Wordsmith.org (13 February 2008).

Wordsmith.org (13 February 2008). A.word.a.day—idiopathy. Available: https://wordsmith.org/words/idiopathy.html

Part of the Plan

We lost Dan Fogelberg to prostate cancer on 16 December.

Photo by: Henry Diltz

I have these moments all steady and strong

I’m feeling so holy and humble

The next thing I know I’m all worried and weak

And I feel myself starting to crumble

—Dan Fogelberg

I know that doesn’t seem like an uplifting way to start a post about a party, but New Year’s is all about mortality and rebirth—isn’t it?

So—we went to a New Year’s Eve party at the church president's house. CP is a very nice woman from Maine, and this bash is one of her annual events. We showed up late, and I was ready to leave about an hour later. I’m really not one for this kind of thing. Growing up, I was always in the band. So I am much more comfortable with some degree of control when in a crowded environment. Noise just adds to the out-of-control feeling.

But Suna was having a good time catching up with people she had not seen in a while. I had fun eating too much and drinking the non-alcoholic punch. We kept deciding to stay just a little longer, and it eventually ended up being midnight.

Everybody liked my New Year’s resolution. It sets a really low expectation, and nobody can really stay mad at me if I don’t keep it.

• Not to die this year

So you see: it’s all part of the plan.

Survival

Today was the day my nephew-in-law, who is older than I am by a couple of years, went under the knife for prostate cancer. I spoke to my niece, Sweetness, on the phone while he was still under, and she called me back after he was in recovery. The surgery lasted almost seven hours, but the prognosis is good—and that is all that matters.

He should be able to go home by Wednesday, which is the same day the test results will tell us if the doctors got all of the cancer. If not, they can probably wipe out the rest with radiation. But I am hopeful that he won’t have to deal with that.

Grateful Monday

So that is what I am grateful for: good results in bad situations. I am grateful for Sweetness, who deserves so much better than life has dealt her.

Sweetness, I love you. I meant it when I said don’t forget to take care of yourself over the next few weeks. You promised, and I’m holding you to it.

PS. No picture and no poetry today. Nothing seemed appropriate.

---

Friday Update: The surgery was successful. The labs showed that they got all of the cancer, and he can return to work without chemotherapy or radiation.