1168 lines
59 KiB
Plaintext
1168 lines
59 KiB
Plaintext
File: mayday.txt
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Cont: Captain Slog, Blahdate 20045.1
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It's may. Things are getting a little bit colder. But no rain. I hope you
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liked the nuke mag' resonance picture of the psycho kidney. I tried to
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scan in the transverse CT of my neck, so you could look at Bill-the-met in
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all his necrotic glory, but the flatbed scanner just wouldn't resolve it.
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Oh well. It's just a blob anyway. Remembered, perhaps as The Blob That Ate
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Predator.
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Sunday night I caught up with Liisa and Max, her hard-smokin' Finnish dad.
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They're off to Kyogle and I'm staying in Skidney. Liisa's not gonna be
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capable of rug rattery anytime soon since it appears she's been poisoned
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into amenorrhoea by various nasty fumes'n'shit at her previous place of
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employ. She still looks pretty thin and even feels bony when we hug. Arrr.
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But her hair has grown back and she's not totally caved in like she used
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to be. I slung her some RAM to stick in her 'poota and we had a chat at
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the Harp pub (where she was glassed some months ago) about stuff in
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general.
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I hate how much of a disintegrating old coot I sound like when I mention
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here in the rant that I have this vague pain in my right lower back.
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Normally I'd not give a shit but arr, the great thing about cancer is you
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can get paranoid about all the usual aches and pains which accompany your
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life, so I wonder if it isn't some sort of carcinogenic cookie monster
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come to munch on my spine or somethin'.
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-----
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It's tuesday now as I write. I have no idea what I got up to on Monday,
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tho the cat meeting was a good'un. We're getting on top of those parts of
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the system's unreliability which we can control. Since we have two links
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Soz is gonna write some supervisory scripts to route stuff out on
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whichever one happens to work. Leah (to whom I loaned my copy of "A
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Natural History of Rape") and I had a verbal wrestle wherein she mentions
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she believes that biology can't exist without culture. I just don't have
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it in me to fall over laughing my pants off about such a comment any more.
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Name a single celled organism which gives a shit about art.
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Oh, yeah. Monday. I remember now. I met Joss' mum in a cafe at Carillion
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Avenue. She gave me a load of stuff to read and accompanied me to see Dave
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Eisinger, who's a renal cancer specialist (I think this means he watches
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more people die of it than other people). We chatted about a lot of stuff.
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He reckons we should chase whatever mets we find. Bill-the-Lump has
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certain advantages, he sez, insofar as we can use him as a straightforward
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diagnostic indicator of wether or not any treatments I might try are
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having any useful influence. I'd prefer this particular diagnostic
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indicator was somewhere the fuck else, like oh, in my left little toe, so
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I didn't have to worry about losing any really important shit if it
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decides to go prognostic instead. I want bill out of my bod. I wanted it
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out six months ago. Eisinger suggests they shoot me full of radioactive
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glucose and see what bits of my body metabolise it fastest, with a PET
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scanner (tumors love glucose and short carbs). So we can spot any of
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Bill's other relatives - they'll look like Bill in the scan, wherever it
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is in my body they happen to show up.
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He felt my guts and said it felt lumpy. I suspect this might have been
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because of dinner or general skinniness or fibrous tissue encapsulation of
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the little bits of steel in my guts. I hope so anyway.
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I'd spent a few days freakin' out about Bill once I found out he'd blocked
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my left jugular 'cos that sort of implied he might be going for a carotid
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artery next.
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<geek>
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Thought process table entry for pred, freaking out about Bill:
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Fuck, fuck, fuck, fuck, fuck, oh, FUCK!!, fuck, arrrgh, fuck, fuck, FUUUCK!
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</geek>
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I finally got the detailed clues about what Bill is full of:
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"The aspirate is cellular and consists of numerous malignant cells in a
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predominantly dispersed pattern and some poorly cohesive sheets. The
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cells have eccentrically placed nuclei with irregular nuclei,
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hyperchromatic granular chromatin, multiple macronucleoli and a moderate
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amount of finely vacuolated cytoplasm. Mitoses and abundant necroses are
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also noted. The appearances are those of a metastatic high-grade
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carcinoma with features favouring a renal primary.
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Did the patient have clear cell renal carcinoma and was it Fuhrmann grade 4?
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(yes, actually, but I think I told them that)
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Malignant cells in the sections of the cell block are positive for
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cytokeratins (Cam 5.2 and AE1/AE3) and vimentin. This supports the
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diagnosis of metastatic renal cell carcinoma."
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Woohoo, some molecular data. Great. I have no idea what vimentin is yet.
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I calmed down a lot when I cracked open Grays Anatomy (after attending the
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cat meeting), and checked out the drawings of cranial arterial supply.
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There's this arterial loop called the circle of Willis and it's fed by
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both carotids and a couple of other rearward arteries whose names I can't
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remember. Everything in yer brain is fed off this loop, but due to its
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redundant feed architecture blood can flow around it in whatever direction
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the pressure profile requires. So if I lose a carotid feed I probably
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won't drop off the horizon immediately. I dont know if I should hope for
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this or not.
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Natch if a big chunk o' Bill decides to detach, float upwards and block
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some the stuff coming off the circle, that could be a total catastrophe
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for whatever it happens to block since there's no redundant supply beyond
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that. In some scenarios, the neurons housing the personality writing this
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rant will die, and that will be the end of the screed. Welcome to Planet
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Brain Damage. Proceed directly to Hell. Shit. Oh, wait! I have a card from
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Polyester Books, sez Get Out Of Hell Free! Cool. Remind me to have that
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surgically implanted sometime.
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I notice I more frequently suffix some of my paragraphs with a profanity.
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Shit.
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I wonder, to myself, if I am still in denial. I look around my room, it's
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not the room of someone who's cleaned up in preparation for their final
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departure. Shit.
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I still go to specialists and they still don't tell me anything useful.
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Yeah, it's gratuitous. Shit. Shit. Shit.
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Bugger. EMI and Warner have deleted Goldfrapp's Felt Mountain album,
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already. It's this sort of misbehaviour which makes me even more motivated
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to rip off the record companies by copying their stuff. If they won't sell
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it I'll steal it. Fuck'em.
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I rang up the switch at RPA and it rang for a long time before anyone
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answered. I asked them to patch me through to their nuke medicine section.
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They also took a long time to answer the fone so I hung up. I dialled the
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switch again and got their number and rang that myself. They told me that
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some or other referring specialist had to fill in a form. Now, that's
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Eisinger but his take was that I should talk to a Prof Boyer before the
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PET scan happens, even though Eisinger's recommendation is that we chase
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mets and the best way to find 'em is with the PET scanner. It shits me
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that I need to hear the same stuff from another doctor. PETs are a bit
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dear, too, circa $1k per throw. Arr, what the hell. Jab me with atomic
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waste, light 'em up, those mets. I'm still not ready to see what the
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ghostly antielectrons might have to show me.
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---
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Wednesday 5th. I've got the 'flu. At 10:35 I put mum on the back of the
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'cycle and rode out to see Mary, who was stoked that we came out to see
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her. Then we both wandered around the Waverley Cemetary, which is strewn
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with monuments to people's lifelong fear of a god they believed to exist,
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and also with evidence of granite, picrite and sandstone masonry pissing
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contests, to show who had the best family vault and worshipped god in
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a more hard-core manner than the next stiff. Wankers. The best stone of
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the lot was an unassuming slab o' black granite engraved with a picture of
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a sloop and the words "I'd rather go sailing." We went to Newtown and
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sucked coffee again. Then whizzed off to HellaTurella (I scored a
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replacement wankerfone aerial off someone's installation artwork). Then
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home. Back out to STUCCO to shotgun cannabis smoke off George and Paddy
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before gigglingly slapping in a network card in someone's very dusty
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pentium1, win95 machine. A delightful day. Except I dribbled a lot of snot
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and felt like shit.
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Thursday I woke up with my face snot-welded to the pillowcase and my
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turbinates full of something like solyent green, fucking yucko. This is
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not a recreational strain of the 'flu... it's ascorbate time, I went up
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the pharmo and bagged a big jar of it. I did a CPU transplant on the ol'
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Robo608 board, so now it goes at half a GHz and is worth keeping around
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for a while longer. I roped it to my pack and dropped it into Turella. On
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the way I popped in at the pathologist to have yet another 21-gague canula
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stuffed up my arm and blood sucked out.
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Then I went around to my old squat. It's knee-deep in grass and full of
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scavenged, low-technology junk. Her droopy-eyed grey brindled dog barked a
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lot before Req answered the door. She squatted with me for a while back in
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2002, and aside from that she appeared to live entirely on tinned beef
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stroganoff, I never thought there was anything unusual about her ('cept
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for the time when she tried to walk through the back door without opening
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it). She was squatting the derilect Masonic centre on Regent st a couple
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of years before that... I arranged a bodgy mains power supply for 'em so
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they could have light and power points and hot water. They activated every
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air-conditioner in the place, on full blizzard mode, which made me laugh.
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She knew I was coming around 'cos I'd SMS'd her boyfriend in advance.
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She's caved-in like Liisa was, and wears black. Black pants with the arse
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falling out of them and the knees worn out. Black vest. Black shirt. Black
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belt. Black sort of suits her in a nomenclatural way. Black history, I
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think.
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We sorta weren't looking at each other when we were doing the
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re-acquaintance small talk. So I got straight to the point. Was she in a
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position to acquire half a gram of smack, white, i.v. grade, and was she
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up for a spotter's fee? Her eyes sorta bugged out for a couple of seconds.
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What'd I want it for, why so much? I filled her in on what the story was
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with big bad Bill. She asked several times if I wasn't drunk or nutz or
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something. Then told me she couldn't use the stuff any more. After ten
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years of junk use, they'd implanted slow-release naltrexone in her
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abdominal wall. But yeah. It might take a couple of hours (man, you find
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me anything else which has this short a supply turnaround) but yeah. Hang
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around.
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I tend not to trust smackies, 'cos they have motivation to lie, steal yer
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stuff, and so on. I figured $160 was a cheap price to learn about wether
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or not Req was straight up or not. I read Zen Flesh Zen Bones while the
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dog sat on the couch, chewing its fleabitten genitals. The sun fell over
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the western horizon. I sunk into the tattered leather couch, and
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slept.
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A couple of hours later I awoke as the dog snarled at the sound of
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someone's approach. She showed up with a small clear snaplock baggie
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containing what looked like a small chunk of ceiling plaster. Half a gram,
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white, a bit pocked, hard as hell. It was a bit more than the usual ask,
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and cost a bit more than we expected, so it took a bit longer and so I
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coughed another twenty bucks. I paid the bux; get the right stuff, do the
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job properly, business is business. Quality, along with everything else,
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is forgotten shortly after you've forgotten the price. You're sure you're
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not drunk, yer serious right, she kept asking. Come on dude, this is one
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of the most serious transactions of my life, I didn't come here to jerk
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you around, don't jerk me around either. Yeah, ok.
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I didn't expect the tutorial but I was glad of it. She sat down, took off
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her belt, got a spoon and some salt for demonstration purposes. Told me to
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filter the stuff through a ciggie butt or a clean tampon or something
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else. Flick it a bit to get the air out. 27 gague needle, 60mL, smaller
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the gague the more likely the stuff'd recrystallise in the cannula and the
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more resistance you get forcing the plunger down. Lotsa good sterile
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technique in there, swab this, boil that. Don't heat the stuff, but
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sterilise the water. Bend the spoon neck a bit so the stuff doesn't fall
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out. If the rock is hard you can crush it with another spoon. She said
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she'd kill for my veins, which stood out prominently. Go close to the
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elbow crease. Avoid other veins recently punctured. Aim centrally to the
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vein. Keep the cannula point down and the hollow surface up. Shallow
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angle. Choose somewhere which isn't a lump, which is probably a valve. She
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did it all with the visible ease of someone who has done it a thousand
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times before, like her arms knew what they had to do. It'll take practise
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before you can do it reliably, she said. She got the shivers remembering
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this sequence of actions and what followed it. Ya just gotta take yer hat
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off to people who don't try and talk you out of injecting yourself with a
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ticket to Rookwood. Shelf life indefinite. You won't get any time to get
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sick on this stuff. Make damn sure you get it all up the spout though,
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don't wanna be half-full and drop the stuff, or you won't die and you'll
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get brain damage.
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I packed the rock in my bag [Trafficable Quantity, Possession Carries A
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Custodial Sentence] and made to leave. Thanks dude. I kissed her on the
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forehead, my angel of death, tears seeped down my nasal ducts where my
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faint sniffling could be plausibly passed off as a consequence of this
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'flu I have. She will never get any cred for providing me with this stuff,
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having the guts to be the intermediary agent by which I will be painlessly
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freed. She deserves a medal. No. We pin that stuff on people who do really
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important, life-changing stuff, like ... you know... run around a fucking
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athletics field. She walked me out to where I was parked. If there was
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anything I needed, just ask. Well... a gas chromatograph of this stuff
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would be nice but I didn't think I was gonna get it. Wrong kind of
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industry.
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I rode the 'cycle around to the Sydney Uni library and found out the
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Lubeck Uni team were using tumor cells, extracted, incubated with
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interferon gamma, cryogenically killed and then autologously injected.
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Whoah.
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I came home and ate a can of shitake mushrooms and went to bed. I woke up
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in a newly updated puddle of snot. Showering (my first in a week, I'd
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claim water restrictions and all that, but really it just boils down to
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that I couldn't be fucked getting out of my clothes sometimes) didn't make
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me feel any better but it did wash the biofilm off my face. I should have
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stayed in bed, really, I did fuck-all of any significance during the
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daylight. Well, actually I did find my quartz crucible, my thermometer, a
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bunch of tapered boro' pipettes, a spray can of xylocaine. I couldn't find
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the silicone immersion oil. All of this crap, except for the xylocaine, is
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to enable me to do a melting point test on the smack, to see if it's
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within the literature values. I flame-sealed a pipette at one end, I have
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to drop a chunk of the stuff down there so it's thermally coupled to the
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pipette, then heat the oil and watch the thermometer when the stuff melts.
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I got an email from Leelz, which I laughed at very hard, about how she's
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getting paid stupid amounts of money to shit in people's mouths in
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Montreal. To the right people shit really is worth something, it appears.
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Certain Canadians are gonna get bad breath.
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I retreated to my room at night again, declining by SMS two offers of a
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shag, from two people who, when I told them I was a dribbling snot monster
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from outer space, separately claimed already to have had the 'flu already.
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I'd go talk to my olds, except they are both in front of sustained,
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electronic inanity of the blaring TV (they're a bit deaf) which they
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evidently find preferable to my conversation, and mum smokes anyway - I'd
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sit in front of the fire 'cept the updraught sucks her putrid fag smoke
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towards me when I do. They think this is all perfectly reasonable. Do they
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think Ray fucking Martin's gonna tell 'em the significant issues of their
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day, like that their son's finally tooled up to kill himself? Maybe they
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do. They're used to coming home and selling their eyeballs to Young and
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Rubicam.
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"Hey Ray - get your haaand off it."
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-TISM (Been Caught Wanking) from the www.tism.wanker.com album (Shock Records)
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"You don't drink, you don't smoke, you don't go to the football, you don't
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go to the races, you don't live in a real world. This isn't life
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or death, this is more important - this is what beer you're gonna drink."
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-advertising mogul John Singleton, quoted in "Boring Fart"
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Mr Floppy - from the "Unbearable Lightness of Being a Dickhead" album
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(ZPD001 - Mushroom Distribution Services 9 398601 020628 )
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I remember the foaming pandemonium which gripped them both when dad
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accidentally brushed the hidden, and unbeknownst, ON/OFF switch while
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opening the adjacent window. They bought ANOTHER TV and couldn't get that
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to work either. Dad was very fucking grumpy when I refused to set the new
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one up on the basis that I believed that the old one was not broken. These
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otherwise normal citizens are classically conditioned tube addicts. Maybe
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your family has one. Why it shits me now is these dudes and millions like
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them think they have a lifespan to waste, collectively years of their
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lives, not even communicating, just sucking noise, adverts, adverts
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dressed up as news, stuff which isn't news (just history repeating itself)
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and various kinds of misinformation. Why for fuck's sake does fashion week
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make it to air and contaminate my rants by provoking me to complain about
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its mind-smashing banality? I mean, it'd be interesting to watch if the
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emaciated waifs had to oh, I dunno, run from a guard dog instead of
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dysplastically flouncing down the runway with a gaunt look of grim angst
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on their mugs.
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"Who'd rather watch someone's life on TV than participate in their own."
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-Jello Biafra, NoMeansNo, Bill's Diary, (from The Sky Is Falling and I
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Want My Mommy!) - Alternative Tentacles records.
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Well. That cuts you guys out of the clue loop, I reckon. You can find out
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about my death on the fucking telly, where you find out about everything
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else important enough to make it to a corporate-owned PAL raster.
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I drank yet another bottle of BaSO4 for a CT scan I'm undergoing tomorrow.
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I am tired of these things, mainly of the needles to inject the contrast
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medium, but I think there could be worse experiences to undergo in order
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to find out what else my disease is doing.
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Cancer treatment is a stop/go journey. Find something wrong, chop it
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out. Wait. Find something else wrong. Try and find someone who'll chop it
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out. Chop it out. Wait until, inevitably, something else goes wrong. Can't
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chop it out this time. Cry a lot. Get dead. Zzzzz. My story has been
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played out in a million other abdomens and I've never heard about them.
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Maybe it's like mine.
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"Violence. Boredom. Violence. Boredom."
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- Dave Grainey's Country Idyll - Jock Cheese (Platter)
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I'm using gramofile to rip Jock Cheese Platter for Phludde. It was the
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first album I listened to after the diagnosis. I like this track 'cos it's
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so ... failed escapist. It's about the tacit observation that you can run
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wherever you like, ditch yer city job, sell yer house if you have one,
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fuck off down the coast or wherever, in search of some freedom you might
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imagine to be there, somewhere, any-elsewhere, and ... you'll discover
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that life still has sucky aspects wherever you go, and certain people will
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still bash the piss out of you in the carpark regardless of what place
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you've chosen to hide from the last place you chose to live. I'm not sure
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what they're getting at, but it's probably that one bring's one's
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suckiness with one wherever one goes.
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It occurs to me that I might well chicken out of shooting the smack if
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anyone I like is there on the night. Zen Flesh points out, correctly, how
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painfully sweet things are when you're about to lose them all. I am
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sometimes taunted by the thought that I somehow fucked up my life, and
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it'd be not entirely unexpected to me if my last memory was something
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like, "this fuckin' syringe is blocked", then I wake up in a cell or a
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hospital someplace, on account of having fucked up my death too.
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----------
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The radiographer up at South Hurstville is my height, 100 kgs of processed
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beef, and I have come to know him moderately well of late - he smiled at
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me as I showed up this morning. I was feeling hungry, fluey and generally
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rotten. He moves with the non-alacrity which comes from living in a chunk
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of meat which takes a bit more time to accelerate than my rather more
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gracile chassis.
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"Not again." He said. "Yeah. Not again." I said wringing a half-cocked
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smile out of the side of my face. He passed me another bottle of BaSO4 and
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said, you know the drill. I gulped it down and waited for 20 minutes while
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it dispersed itself in my small intestine. I ditched my clothes, got into
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a disposable gown, and climbed on. He got the canula in beautifully the
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first time (I suggested 21 gague, left arm). Full of that whooshy
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iopamidol, I was fed into the eye of that inane beige cowling which is
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meant to protect me from any understanding of how the whirling electrical
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eyes within it function, and from guessing what demographic of people tend
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to lie here to be subjected to their electromagnetic gaze.
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|
|
|
I went out, ate an apple and had some coffee (and read B magazine, gotta
|
|
know what they're pretending to think) and scored a massively overpriced
|
|
copy of Felt Mountain at inSanity while the radiographers developed the
|
|
CTs.
|
|
|
|
I came back and picked up the envelope. Private and confidential, it said,
|
|
but it's my disease, I'm gonna read about it, thanks.
|
|
|
|
There's more.
|
|
|
|
Of course.
|
|
|
|
|
|
Now, aside from Bill, there are a bunch of enlarged (see also, stuffed
|
|
with rogue renal cells) right-side lymph nodes, and a new mass, in back of
|
|
my inferior vena cava, squishing it.
|
|
|
|
I don't have to be paranoid any more, now I know why my back hurts and why
|
|
it goes hurt, hurt, hurt with every heartbeat in particular positions.
|
|
Check it out in the Grays Anatomy, the IVC is the fat central vein taking
|
|
blood out of my legs and kidneys ... ah, kidney, and stuff, and routing it
|
|
up to the right cardiac atrium, if memory serves me correctly. I fed this
|
|
out to Joss' mum:
|
|
|
|
|
|
---------- Forwarded message --------------------------------------------
|
|
Date: Sat, 8 May 2004 15:55:29 +1000 (EST)
|
|
From: predator@cat.org.au
|
|
To: Joss' mum, <caz@shotmail.com>
|
|
Subject: But wait, there's more...
|
|
|
|
|
|
Hi Caz...
|
|
|
|
I climbed into the CT scanner today, and they scanned the chest and
|
|
abdomen. I thought something might be uh, interesting since they spent a
|
|
bit more time than usual scanning my lower body. This is because, as
|
|
Eisinger might have suspected, there's more involved lymph nodes, so they
|
|
scanned 'em again at higher resolution. Here's the chewy assessment:
|
|
|
|
--------------
|
|
Folio 889299-1 U/R No 59376
|
|
|
|
There is a mass lesion in the left supraclavicular region measuring 5.1 x
|
|
4.3 cm in diameter with inhomogeneous attenuation after IV contrast and
|
|
this has the appearances of a lymph node mass. Comparison is made with a
|
|
previous scan of 20/04/04 and this has not changed significantly in
|
|
appearence. There is no mediastinal lymphadenopathy and the lungs and
|
|
pleural cavities remain clear.
|
|
|
|
There are no signs of any pulmonary metastases.
|
|
|
|
In the abdomen the liver appears normal and there are no hepatic
|
|
metastases. There is a soft tissue mass lesion behind the IVC displacing
|
|
and compressing the IVC and there appears to be some large retrocaval
|
|
lymph nodes present probably due to metastatic disease. This is best
|
|
appreciated on images 63 to 72 on page 4 and in the last enlarged
|
|
film. The left nephrectomy is noted. The right kidney function promptly
|
|
after intravenous injection is normal. The pancreas and spleen are
|
|
unremarkable and there was no further abnormality demonstrated.
|
|
|
|
CONCLUSION Enlarged lymph nodes in left supraclavicular fossa and right
|
|
retrocaval region.
|
|
|
|
Dr E Bass
|
|
|
|
---------
|
|
The fun doesn't stop, does it? I'll wave this under Poole's nose on Tues.
|
|
|
|
Oh, yeah. On Se, my Martindales 30th suggests that the absolute max one
|
|
should be taking of selenomethionine or selenocysteine is 465 mikes daily
|
|
and they (whoever wrote the particular report) also reckon there was no
|
|
really hard evidence to suggest the stuff was really of any benefit for
|
|
cancer or cardiovascular disease; The jar I buy containing it suggests
|
|
more than 100 mikes/day is toxic. I figure it's no good taking the stuff
|
|
at oncostatic levels if that will bugger up other things (Martindales
|
|
refers to a report suggesting Se homeostasis might be destabilised in the
|
|
presence of large [Se]. So 100 mikes it shall be. Oral Se doesn't appear
|
|
to have slowed down the appearance of other lymph mets though again these
|
|
might have been cryptics, already doomed before we tossed the kidney.
|
|
|
|
|
|
-----------------
|
|
|
|
|
|
I viewed this black news in the quiet, solitary gloom of the subfloor
|
|
carpark at 2 Ormonde Pde. All I could manage to say was "Ohhhh, poo" as I
|
|
breathed out and let my eyelids fall gently down as if they'd somehow
|
|
repel the message bouncing off the page.
|
|
|
|
Influenza's looking positively laughable, enjoyable, desirable by
|
|
comparison but I'm only saying this 'cos I think I'm getting over the
|
|
'flu... it's usually something straightforwardly overcome, but has
|
|
historically killed tens of millions.
|
|
|
|
|
|
Right about now, Mr Floppy says it pretty well:
|
|
---------------------------
|
|
|
|
I feel this is the lot which I accept and which will not change.
|
|
|
|
I feel exhausted.
|
|
|
|
If I had not seen other lunatics close up, I should not have been able to
|
|
free myself from dwelling on it constantly.
|
|
|
|
I feel exhausted.
|
|
|
|
I generally try to be very cheerful.
|
|
|
|
My life is all so threatened at the very root.
|
|
|
|
I feel exhausted.
|
|
|
|
I know well that healing comes if one is brave, from within; through
|
|
profound resignation to suffering and death; through the surrender of your
|
|
own will, and of your self-love.
|
|
|
|
I feel exhausted.
|
|
|
|
I generally try to be very cheerful.
|
|
|
|
I see no happy future at all.
|
|
|
|
I feel exhausted.
|
|
|
|
I see no happy future at all.
|
|
|
|
I feel exhausted.
|
|
|
|
I see no happy future at all.
|
|
|
|
I feel exhausted.
|
|
|
|
I see no happy future at all.
|
|
|
|
Mr Floppy - "Sunflowers"
|
|
- from the "Unbearable Lightness of Being a Dickhead" album
|
|
(ZPD001 - Mushroom Distribution Services 9 398601 020628 )
|
|
|
|
|
|
It's about the most depressing bit of music I've ever heard. I think, on
|
|
the whole, the album achieved a balance nevertheless, given their
|
|
screamingly funny speed-metal version of Wuthering Heights.
|
|
|
|
|
|
------------------------------
|
|
|
|
|
|
I came home via the junkpile and found my spoke key, a litre of rotary
|
|
vacuum pump silicone oil, a couple of CDs I wanted to listen to, a bunsen
|
|
burner, a cylinder of propane, an old Telectronics defibrillator/pacemaker
|
|
I had intended to cut open for years, and a big boro frit funnel. Ho-kay,
|
|
now we find out if the angel of death can be relied upon. Melting point
|
|
tests rely on the change of reflectivity of materials when they
|
|
crystallise. You can see the powder turn to a clear liquid.
|
|
|
|
DIY melting point test.
|
|
|
|
1) flame-seal the end of the pipette in an oxidising flame.
|
|
2) drop test material into open end of the pipette, flick until a few
|
|
mm depth of test material is compacted in sealed end of pipette.
|
|
3) Clamp quartz crucible in retort stand. Half-fill with nonflammable
|
|
clear oil with high boiling temperature. Preheat oil
|
|
4) Clamp 340 degree thermometer and test pipette with ends adjacent under
|
|
oil surface.
|
|
5) add a contrasting material behind the test material to clearly
|
|
visualise changes in state.
|
|
6) heat crucible. Observe temperature reading as material
|
|
starts to melt and completes melting, and also as material commences
|
|
and completes recrystallisation on removal of heat source. Repeat until
|
|
results stabilise.
|
|
|
|
Silicone oil is used in high-vacuum apparatus precisely because it's hard
|
|
to boil it, gases don't dissolve well in it so it doesn't outgas much
|
|
under heating or reduced pressure, nor does it chemically break down into
|
|
a gas when you heat it up a lot - and it absolutely refuses to catch fire.
|
|
|
|
|
|
The defib, even though it was oh, twenty years old, was beautifully
|
|
engineered. It spewed glaring white sparks when I cut through it with the
|
|
diamond disc, which makes me think its casing was titanium, not stainless
|
|
steel (ferrous metals have yellowish or red sparks). All the ICs were
|
|
shielded in gold, the SMD resistors all notched down to precise
|
|
tolerances. I still haven't figured out the electrochemistry of the
|
|
batteries... if indeed that's what they are. They're absolutely flat.
|
|
There's one thing in there with 2.5V still on it. Also a bunch of
|
|
Beryllium Oxide SCRs, sealed in stainless steel cases... fascinating place
|
|
to hide toxic waste - within the thoraxes of cardiac patients. This must
|
|
be why it's dodgy to put pacemakers into crematoria.
|
|
|
|
I told mum the results of the CT. She lit up a smoke and said oh shit. She
|
|
wept a little bit and said, in the past tense, we didn't have you for
|
|
long, did we. She's waking up. Later I showed her the little rock of opiod
|
|
agonist and the rig with which I was going to verify the material's
|
|
purity. I don't think she understands what the test tells me. I'd identify
|
|
the stuff much better with a time-of-flight mass spec but I'd go to gaol
|
|
for bringing in such a sample to be tested.
|
|
|
|
|
|
---------------------
|
|
|
|
I staggered off to the Mekanarchy gig. From the roof beams hung a cool
|
|
spider sculpture with a gas-axed four-stroke four cylinder engine camshaft
|
|
controlling the legs which moved around, spider-like under the influence
|
|
of a half-horsepower motor (ever seen what half a horse looks like?).
|
|
Wicked costumes. More people I havent seen for ages who seem incapable of
|
|
understanding that when I die I am dead, and I am tired of hearing waffly
|
|
crap about how my energy or spirit or some such bollocks is gonna remain.
|
|
Think about how much data my personality needs to encode it up there on my
|
|
neocortex, and then how much bandwidth there is available to get it out. I
|
|
can probably name and remember large sections of thousands of songs,
|
|
millions of events that have made up my life, rah rah. I mean, I wrote
|
|
this much rant in six months and it took up about half a megabyte, right?
|
|
It's like my CV was, a mere slice of what I did and where I was and what I
|
|
was thinking and feeling for my whole life. All those memories, doomed to
|
|
rot in the great /dev/null of thermodynamics.
|
|
|
|
|
|
I popped over to another party later, at Cremmo's new rental accom, and
|
|
after breathing in more 2ndhand tobacco smoke just slept on a mattress
|
|
Emily laid out for me. I couldn't get comfortable, my back throbbed and
|
|
Cremmo's cat still insists on sitting on my head and purring.
|
|
|
|
I woke, had breakfast at Why, came home, lay in the bath for a while. Got
|
|
out, dressed a bit, answered some email, went back to bed. Low-interest
|
|
sunday, another lost weekend, as Stan Ridgeway might have called it. I
|
|
finally relented to the SMS's and went over to say hi to the South African,
|
|
which is to say, shagged on the couch and we both subsequently collapsed
|
|
as a consequence. We both laughed pretty hard when, in that sort of
|
|
stunned, panting, post-coital silence ya get after a good shaggin' I
|
|
managed to mumble "Happy mother's day." Her kids are in their twenties. We
|
|
chatted long into the night. I wonder when my back met is gonna do
|
|
something like fuck up my ability to walk, or shag, or take a piss when I
|
|
want to. When will it invade that precious shielded data pipe in my
|
|
vertebrae, the roaring vasculature nestled against it, my other kidney, or
|
|
something else important, and fuck up my days permanently.
|
|
|
|
I fed this off to Joss:
|
|
------------
|
|
|
|
From predator@cat.org.au Mon May 10 16:00:41 2004
|
|
Date: Mon, 10 May 2004 13:33:18 +1000 (EST)
|
|
From: predator@cat.org.au
|
|
To: shonky@cat.org.au
|
|
Subject: Time, gentlemen.
|
|
|
|
|
|
Hi dude.
|
|
|
|
Well, I climbed in the CT scanner on saturday and found out why my back
|
|
hurts. Yet another neoplasm, close to the original scene of the crime.
|
|
It's putting pressure on my inferior vena cava which is the big pipe which
|
|
takes used blood from my legs and a few other things and routes it up to
|
|
my heart. It goes ow every time my heart beats and I've run out of ways to
|
|
get posturally comfortable so I'm starting to throw painkillers down my
|
|
neck. There's additional right retrocaval lymph nodes involved now, too.
|
|
|
|
I'd love 'em to chop this shit out. Dad's take is that in his clinical
|
|
experience chopping these things out "doesn't alter outcomes" as he put it
|
|
so they'll probably go the nuclear weapons option and blast it with some
|
|
or other species of radiation. Which the literature tells me doesn't alter
|
|
outcomes much either. Ah, the literature.... said I'd likely be showing up
|
|
with cryptic mets like these within the year after the kidney was
|
|
flung. Sure enough, I have.
|
|
|
|
Goldfrapp's Felt Mountain has nine tracks on it, cost thirty bucks and is
|
|
not as good as Black Cherry I think, much darker. THough I've gotta give
|
|
it a few more listens.
|
|
|
|
Bill hasn't changed. I see a bloke tomorrow who will decide if he can be
|
|
fucked trying to chop it out.
|
|
|
|
I'm not generally inclined to jerk people's schedules around to suit me,
|
|
though I'm very conscious that my remaining time's sorta shortening quite
|
|
rapidly. I'm elapsing. I'm entering that window where nothing will be fun
|
|
any more, 'cos I'll be sick as a dog from treatment, if I decide to have a
|
|
go, and sick as a dog from disease if I decide not to. So if you're still
|
|
inclined to, you should catch me nowish.
|
|
|
|
I miss ya and love ya and it sucks not being near you.
|
|
|
|
x x
|
|
<predator> available for a limited time only
|
|
|
|
------------------------
|
|
|
|
I miss her, and it's odd, her default state for most of our relationship
|
|
has been that she's miles away and I'm cool with it but I'd be much, much
|
|
cooler about her requirements for prolonged periods of solitude if they
|
|
were just smaller slices of my lifespan than they are now. What's a few
|
|
years out of thirty years of remaining lifespan? Fuck all, compared to a
|
|
month out of, for example's sake, six. These days I don't even have any
|
|
guarantee of a handful of months before something critical gets invaded
|
|
and I am suddenly dead. Patience, patience, one part of me says...
|
|
patience be fucked, says another. I feel like such a needy, pleading twonk
|
|
asking her to come back to Sydney while I still have a body which isn't a
|
|
total fuckup to live in, it's an infringement on my "don't bug joss" rule,
|
|
but I feel like I know her less than I used to.
|
|
|
|
I go see the head and neck dude tomorrow morning.
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
-
|
|
Tues, May 11th.
|
|
I did. He looked at my neck, looked at my scan, and said he understood it
|
|
was a good idea trying to get it all out, but couldn't figure out how far
|
|
down into my chest it had gone so I'd have to yet get another scan.
|
|
|
|
He asked who was my GP. I mentioned I gave Paul DeSousa the arse 'cos he
|
|
wouldn't speak molecular biology to me. Prof Poole mentioned this was
|
|
because Paul was not a molecular biologist. Yeah, he's a knife merchant, I
|
|
said. If he doesn't know the mol bio, he doesn't know the disease. Saying
|
|
this sort of stuff to people who are, more or less, precision butchers, is
|
|
not gonna make me popular with their club of blade-toting anatomy
|
|
modifiers, meat sculptors and so forth, upon whom I nevertheless depend
|
|
for accurate expulsion of pieces of myself I don't like. But it's the
|
|
truth. Which is why they don't like it. Fuck it. I don't like it either.
|
|
|
|
|
|
I showed up for the scan later that afternoon and the CT scanner was out
|
|
of commission (they couldn't reboot it, apparently). So I rode home,
|
|
getting stung in the finger by a bee en-route, after it flew into the gap
|
|
between my helmet and my forehead and I tried to wiggle it out. It took a
|
|
certain kind of control to not cause a road accident with the little
|
|
insect angrily thrashing around an inch from my eye. I don't begrudge the
|
|
bee either, I did smack it in the face at 70km/h with a motorcyclist's
|
|
forehead after all.
|
|
|
|
Finger throbbing, I checked out the gear.
|
|
|
|
First things first, shove it under a UV light. No glow... good, some
|
|
shithead hasn't cut it with washing powder for a whiter-than-white
|
|
appearance. Next, bash off a bit of powder and drop it into a flame-sealed
|
|
pipette. I immersed the pipette and the thermometer in the oil, and
|
|
heated the crucible slowly with a bunsen flame. The literature values for
|
|
the melting point of diacetylmorphine and its hydrochloride are a fuck of
|
|
a lot higher than the roughly 99 degrees this stuff melted at (and it
|
|
didn't crystallise on cooling either, suggesting it had been chemically
|
|
changed by the heating). The solubility was weird, it wouldn't dissolve in
|
|
glacial acetic or naphtha, and only dissolved slowly and incompletely in
|
|
excess distilled ethanol. I reckon it's either a tropane or maybe
|
|
fentanyl, or a mixture of stuff, but sure as shit isn't straight heroin.
|
|
Part of whatever it is crystallises out as the ethanol evaporates, and the
|
|
solvent becomes saturated with some-or-other gunk which then nucleates and
|
|
grows crystals, but they're the wrong shape, looking very like oh, needles
|
|
of sulfonamide or something else with acicular crystal habit. Grrrr.
|
|
|
|
This is bloody disappointing, my easy exit isn't there, on-tap like I
|
|
wanted it to be, so I'm still at the mercy of this capricious goddamned
|
|
disease and the specialists who hesitate to chop things out. Yeah yeah
|
|
yeah I know surgery isn't gonna alter the final result of this disease but
|
|
it will fucking alter how I get there and how soon. I wanna ask
|
|
oncologists, so doctor, if this was in your neck, would you chop it out?
|
|
|
|
My passport expired. I'm sort of glad in a way. Natch, a few days after,
|
|
XML SMS'd me asking if I wanted to go to Aukland with her. I never went to
|
|
NZ. Used to be ya didn't need to get a passport to go to NZ... you do
|
|
now... consequence of the Mor_on Terror. I'd be afraid to go over there
|
|
now, I'd get off the plane and this creeping doom'd act up somehow so I
|
|
could be fucked up in a hospital in NZ for a change.
|
|
|
|
I got an SMS from Dougo in Melbourne. Melbourne Clan dude Pagan finally
|
|
died last thursday. Cancer got him too, though not what I have.
|
|
|
|
Dark. Want sleep. Back hurts. Painkillers. Wait for painkillers to kick
|
|
in. Sleep. Wake up and immediately notice the painkillers have worn off.
|
|
Take more painkillers. I am very fucking lucky to live on a part of the
|
|
planet where the US doesn't bomb our pharmaceutical factories. If I wanted
|
|
pain relief in the Sudan, I'd be fucked.
|
|
|
|
Our glorious premier Nob Carr has decided not to legalise growing dope for
|
|
pain control if yer a cancer/HIV/MS/otherwise fucked up pain freak. For
|
|
the time being, paracetamol's doing me well. I have some codiene lined up
|
|
someplace. And some barbiturates... surprising what some microbes like to
|
|
grow in. If I need thebaine I can start chewing poppy seeds but that's a
|
|
lot of work and ungrateful to the teeth.
|
|
|
|
|
|
Being subjected to CT's, which still amaze me for the amazing tech and
|
|
physics they have in them, bores me now. Get 'em over with. This must be
|
|
the forth time we've x-rayed my neck in six months. I asked Goldstein to
|
|
chop Bill the fuckin' met out, in fuckin' January. I'd dyke it out myself
|
|
with a bread knife (oh, they're illegal these days, I hear) in the waiting
|
|
room at the emergency wing of the hospital if I didn't think I'd die of
|
|
blood loss while they waited to attend the subsequent gash. I don't think
|
|
the Prof appreciated my email to him in which I laid it all down that
|
|
although immunology was the way to get out of this disease alive, his
|
|
proposed immunostimulatory treatments are something of a false hope, I
|
|
mean, fuck, we're dealing with cells already selected for their
|
|
immunoevasive talents, aren't we, if we weren't then I wouldn't be full of
|
|
the little bastards, they'da been phagocytosed or apoptosed or wrapped up
|
|
in a fibrotic cocoon or something already by now. I wonder if I'm the
|
|
first patient he's had who's had the temerity, or foolishness, to point
|
|
this out to him. Trust your mechanic? Oh, come on. Go get yer Merck index
|
|
and look up some of the drugs people use on cancer patients.
|
|
Cisplatin..."This substance may be reasonably anticipated to be a
|
|
carcinogen."... doxorubicin... "This substance may be reasonably
|
|
anticipated to be a carcinogen."... cyclophosphamide.... this material is
|
|
a known carcinogen... would ya believe it? In my professional opinion as
|
|
a biochemist it does rather strike me as fundamentally fucking stupid to
|
|
shoot up cancer patients with things that cause cancer. Whichever dweeb
|
|
thought that up?
|
|
|
|
|
|
After years of dreaming about doing it, and getting my modem knocked off
|
|
the line by mum inquisitively picking up the reciever, I rigged up
|
|
something to drop the carrier on the excessively (you know, several hours,
|
|
very low baud, highly redundant content) long phone calls mum gets into
|
|
(and complains she can't get out of), and it worked like a charm -
|
|
complete nobrainer - an RJ11 socket with its pins all bridged. I figure if
|
|
they're talking about something really important they'll call back. This
|
|
means I can actually make those brief, important calls to book
|
|
appointments with doctors who don't have fucking emails, when my
|
|
wankerfone's out of credit, and then the line's free afterwards.
|
|
|
|
|
|
Yeehar, wednesday. What the fuck did I do on Wednesday? Oh, I dunno
|
|
actually. I know I popped in at the glassblowers and asked 'em if they
|
|
wanted my Schott and Duran quickfit borosilicate rigs back, since the
|
|
value of the beautiful stuff'd be lost on other people, got my tests back
|
|
and I'm -ve for hiv, trep. pallidum, cocc. rickettsia, and hepB, of
|
|
fucking course. Chatted for a while to Fee and Jase again.... I wonder if
|
|
they're thinking I'm satan, sent to tempt them away from their christian
|
|
ethics, but they're asking pretty good questions actually. I looked out
|
|
the window at the last time at the big old figs in the Domain, before some
|
|
fuckhead chops them down. I spent some time thinking about how to build a
|
|
cheap rack-mount poota out of a mobo, PSU and a dead 1U hub chassis, and
|
|
also some time attempting a final recrystallisation of the dodgy smack,
|
|
which separated out into two fractions with different crystal habits and
|
|
one fraction which wouldn't dissolve in hot ethanol at all. Every few
|
|
seconds on Wednesday my tumors continued on their inexorable work
|
|
schedule, sucking resources out of their environment, popping out new
|
|
ones, like some kind of outta-control property developers.
|
|
|
|
Stupid little fuckers, they'd collectively weigh about as much as the pile
|
|
of neocortical cells with which I think about them, now, and yet I still
|
|
know so little about them, their particular molecular nuances. It's coming
|
|
down to brain versus blob and I'm feeling distinctly stupid by comparison.
|
|
If you could just walk up to somewhere, get some cells sucked out of ya
|
|
and have their metabolic profile extracted, so you knew what they were
|
|
doing, what they depended on for their survival, that'd really fuckin'
|
|
rock. Well, ya can, actually. Affymetrix chips could tell you what RNA
|
|
they make, which is a pretty good indicator of what genes they're
|
|
expressing and what metabolic processes they're running. I dunno anyone
|
|
who does this sort of profiling. Then... even if we had that, the
|
|
question'd be, how to hit these bastards in such a way that doesn't smash
|
|
all of the rest of me? Everything they do is stuff my other cells do too.
|
|
|
|
|
|
I wonder, in the aftermath of my death, what the murmered cliches will be?
|
|
`he died after a long struggle with cancer', `he passed away'; that
|
|
asshole God'll probably get a lot of mention too - `he went to God', or
|
|
some such hackneyed shit that seems to get murmered at all the funerals
|
|
I've ever attended, which isn't many. Someone'll correctly conclude Pred
|
|
died 'cos he didn't _outsmart_ his disease. I don't draw any comfort from
|
|
the idea that much bigger, better brains than mine have faced and failed
|
|
against this pathology.
|
|
|
|
Maybe how he died was, he let it kill him 'cos he couldn't be fucked
|
|
hanging around any more, which is in some ways actually a bit closer to
|
|
the truth than I'm really comfortable with telling. I'm not exactly doing
|
|
anything significant with my life now. Stuff's ever so slowly, ever so
|
|
surely, going grey. It's not a `long struggle with cancer' either, it's
|
|
not like some sort of sustained armwrestle on an even table under good
|
|
lighting where you can see what's happening straight away. It's more like
|
|
a hoarde of mozzies sucking you out from the inside, you can slap a few of
|
|
them, burn yerself trying to fry 'em all on the bug zapper, poison yerself
|
|
with mozzie spray, and eventually, all that's left is the mozzies, which
|
|
all die 'cos they've run out of stuff to suck on. Bzzzzzzzzzzzzt.
|
|
|
|
On wednesday night I went over to Nomes' place and played with parachutes
|
|
and read about skydiving accidents and how people spot 'em before they're
|
|
gonna happen, and ate some yummie pork chops and drank some odd
|
|
Czechoslovakian root'n'bark liquor which smelled like Angostura bitters...
|
|
once we were bit pissed we discovered that it was very funny when the
|
|
following line from Agent Smith in The Matrix...
|
|
|
|
"Have you ever stood, stared at it, marvelled in its beauty, its genius?
|
|
Billions of people just living out their lives... oblivious. Did you know
|
|
that the first matrix was designed to be a perfect human world, where
|
|
none suffered, where everyone would be happy. It was a disaster, no-one
|
|
would accept the program, entire crops were lost. Some believed that we
|
|
lacked the programming language to discribe your perfect world but I
|
|
believe that as a species, human beings define their reality through
|
|
misery and suffering - the perfect world was a dream your primitive
|
|
cerebrums kept trying to wake up from. Which is why the matrix was
|
|
redesigned to this - the peak of your civilisation. When I say your
|
|
civilisation, when we started doing your thinking for you it really
|
|
became _our_ civilisation which is, of course, what this is all about.
|
|
Evolution."
|
|
|
|
...is delivered in various other accents than the voice of Hugo Weaving.
|
|
Like, a seth effrican accent, or a new zealand accent, or the squirrel
|
|
from Rocky and Bullwinkle, or the Prime Miniature - the latter is
|
|
especially a scream.
|
|
|
|
|
|
Thurs morning I woke up and went to Randwick to chat to the chick who it
|
|
turns out I correctly rememebered was responsible for the microbial
|
|
culture collection. I told her the sitch, asked about getting some of the
|
|
bugs (dead, if they had any problems with supplying live bugs), and she
|
|
mentioned they'd probably say no. That I could isolate them from the
|
|
environment doesn't matter, it's that they're human pathogens, blah blah
|
|
blah, we have to conform to strict standards and we get whackos asking for
|
|
stuff occasionally, rah rah (I had to laugh, I am a whacko but I'm very
|
|
earnestly intentioned about why I want these specific bugs, S.marcescens
|
|
and Strep pyrogenes.) I feel sometimes like I'm dying of bureaucracy.
|
|
|
|
Got another load of ascorbate shoved up my arm. I don't feel like it's
|
|
doing me any good, but that's not 'cos it feels bad or anything, it feels
|
|
like nothing's happening, and I only know if it's having an effect from
|
|
what shows up on scans later on.
|
|
|
|
I finally dropped in the new Cat server at Turella, picked up XML and went
|
|
around to Smokering's and watched a lot of DVD episodes of the
|
|
Thunderbirds. Man, I remember some of that stuff from my childhood. Wow.
|
|
Gerry Anderson did a fucking good job on that stuff... the *details* on
|
|
everything were really well done. And now, I understand why Alan's always
|
|
grumpy, though I didn't when I was watching this stuff 24 years ago early
|
|
on saturday mornings... Tintin's not shagging him and he's a
|
|
hormone-sodden little adolescent marionette root rat (we looked closely
|
|
for a frontally mounted string for his dick to confirm this suspicion, but
|
|
didn't spot one). We stopped watching this stuff at about 2am and all went
|
|
to sleep in Smokering's room, he and XML on his mattress and m'self on a
|
|
futon he put on the floor. My back hurt.
|
|
|
|
So we lay there, Thunderbird tunes stuck in our heads, chatting about how
|
|
acetic anhydride is used to prepare heroin from morphine (and fuck
|
|
me I remembered the structure of acetic anhydride, too:
|
|
|
|
Me-C=O O=C-Me
|
|
\ /
|
|
O
|
|
|
|
... it's a weirdo di-keto ether thing)
|
|
|
|
We stopped mumbling at about three am and dozed off.
|
|
|
|
We all woke up, Smokering muttering to me something about how to implement
|
|
packet counting on two different subnets on Gnu/Linux firewalls, got into
|
|
his clothes and got out his .303 and a load of ammo and toddled off to the
|
|
shootin' range with XML. I floated over to Balmain, late, and got
|
|
amazingly stoned with Jude, which as I warned 'em would make me very
|
|
giggly, and Soph took fotos of me in this dazed state of blissed out
|
|
giggledom. We waddled down to Elko park and ate food and waddled back and
|
|
I kinda remember falling asleep upright in a chair on Joss' back balcony
|
|
with the sun shining on the left side of my face. I got out of the chair
|
|
somehow and slept blissfully as the sun set, and woke up to an empty house
|
|
at about eight so I rode around to Turella, had some curry and went to bed
|
|
with Cookie. I didn't go to sleep though - on this night the paracetamol
|
|
wasn't cuttin' it. Nor did the ibuprofen she happened to have. So I
|
|
thrashed around a lot and went off to a light sleep, punctuated with
|
|
little back throbs. It's a nuisance when I shag now too, I can't arch my
|
|
spine all the way backwards without something going sprong and being
|
|
painful. Fuckin' cancer.
|
|
|
|
We staggered out into another glaring sunday, had food up the 'Cinque, and
|
|
walked down to the Alpha House sketch club, where Marg proposed a porno
|
|
party on the 18th of June. I think I will just sit around naked if I am
|
|
well enough to attend.
|
|
|
|
Fuel's hit a dollar again.
|
|
|
|
|
|
-----------
|
|
|
|
May 17th. 12:15am.
|
|
|
|
Ever wanted to strangle your mother? My mum told me this evening, stubbing
|
|
out the remains of her last smoke of the day before retiring to bed to
|
|
cough it up in her sleep, that she believes that the idea that passive
|
|
smoking gives people cancer is a load of gumf.
|
|
|
|
I asked her, where do you think it goes after it comes out of your lungs
|
|
and out of your fag? She said it disappears. No, I told her, it goes on
|
|
the curtains, the walls, the cieling, the bedclothes. The dog stinks of
|
|
it. My hair. My skin. My lungs. Dad's lungs. Then she dropped her
|
|
scientific summary of tobacco combustion chemistry, aerosol physics,
|
|
cancer epidemiology, and refusal to take any responsibility for her
|
|
behaviour or its consequences, on me, supremely confident that she was
|
|
correct, in the way that judges and ministers of religion are when they
|
|
hand down their illuminary insights. That passive smoking gives people
|
|
cancer is a load of gumf.
|
|
|
|
[Your ignorance and stupidity may kill others]
|
|
|
|
For about a second I had this flash of homicidal rage, I felt it ripple
|
|
across me, right down to my toes. I believe that tearing off your
|
|
obviously empty head won't hurt you, either. She didn't spot it. I said
|
|
nothing. I just got up and left the room, with her, her smouldering smoke,
|
|
and the dog on the floor.
|
|
|
|
Holy, holy, holy, shit. What am I turning into? Or have I have just seen
|
|
some sort of monster that has always lurked within, waiting to rip out of
|
|
the veneer I wrap it in, and... you know, really thoroughly, violently,
|
|
gratuitiously fucking atomise somebody, tear their arm off and club them
|
|
to death with it?
|
|
|
|
"I'm addicted to it, son."
|
|
|
|
"You've weaned yourself off harder stuff than that, though, haven't you,
|
|
like the pentobarbitol you used to get into?"
|
|
|
|
She is silent.
|
|
|
|
These days I pull cones 'cos it doesn't fucking matter if I get lung
|
|
cancer (as happens, I should about now get renal cancer nodes in my lungs
|
|
from the shit leaking out of my lymph system). I choose to smoke other
|
|
people's weed when they are kind enough to offer it, because it eases my
|
|
pain, makes me giggle. I do it with other people who are doing the same,
|
|
for whatever reason they're doing it. I don't do it to fuck up other
|
|
people's bodies.
|
|
|
|
--------
|
|
Monday. May 18.
|
|
|
|
Anecdotes:
|
|
|
|
1) Go around to Frank's. He plays the violin he just finished constructing
|
|
and it sounds pretty fuckin good, though this might just be his virtuoso
|
|
playing. I built a new electrode for his Jacobs Ladder ozone generator,
|
|
with which he ages wood years in a matter of weeks.
|
|
|
|
2) MBF rang me up asking permission to use my name in an advertising
|
|
campaign about why people come back to MBF. I told them this would be
|
|
unethical for two reasons. First _they_ fucked up a reciept of payment in
|
|
Nov 2002 which meant my account elapsed. Second... I'm dying and MBF
|
|
will not fix this no matter what level of cover I have. It would be sort
|
|
of silly for a man terminally cankered to go on telly and blab about why
|
|
he went back to the big nasty health care corporation. Wouldn't it?
|
|
|
|
I feel better now.
|
|
|
|
|
|
3) Go look at google.com for the keyphrase
|
|
|
|
uniformly untreatable disease
|
|
|
|
and guess what comes up, complete with instructions on a couple of people
|
|
who had what I have, and managed to survive with massive exposure to
|
|
ascorbate and a few other things.
|
|
|
|
|
|
Bill, by the way, is huge. Following the fascia Bill has extended down to
|
|
about the level of the top of my sternum, and upwards, to the point of
|
|
being about level with the top of my left trapezius muscle. You can see
|
|
Bill attempting to erupt out of my neck, stretching the thin covering of
|
|
skin above him. He feels turgid and botryoidal to the touch. The little
|
|
superficial veins in his immediate vicinity are prominent. I can't quite
|
|
get my thumb under it; I'd estimate there's about 100 grams of bill now.
|
|
|
|
A perhaps undocumented vampiric occupational hazard would be to suck on my
|
|
sinistral nape in its present state of oncological profusion, thereby
|
|
efficiently giving the vampire an heterologous renal metastatic disease
|
|
reducing its lifespan rather significantly, no?
|
|
|
|
|
|
Odd stuff... my left leg went to sleep for no obvious reason, then woke
|
|
up. I feel odd stretchy feelings in my right inner thigh. Oh, what the
|
|
fuck is going on?!
|
|
|
|
I got fuck all sleep last night, the paracetamol isn't cutting it for pain
|
|
relief. I woke up and cried in the shower as the warm water eased it
|
|
somewhat and the realisation dawned that all my mornings might be like
|
|
this one. Or worse. My scrote hurts, my right ilium hurts, the right
|
|
side of my lower back hurts, some of my right leg hurts in certain
|
|
postures. It's all referred pain I expect, from the retrocaval stuff.
|
|
|
|
Prof Poole reckons yeah, they can chop it out, but it's risky to the lymph
|
|
drainage, to the 10th cranial nerve (runs half my larynx) and some of the
|
|
nervous supply to the left arm. May 31st, Bill gets the chop. I think I
|
|
might try and get him in a jar. So I can torture him in the microwave on
|
|
maximum nuke setting for oh, 300 years or so.
|
|
|
|
XML and I spent a lot of time hugging. I went round Toad Hall and gave
|
|
Jude a 6Gb harddisk to replace the glitchy one he used to have. Joss
|
|
showed up, and I think she's pretty frayed, her war of attrition with
|
|
Azza's gradually taking its toll.
|
|
|
|
I went back to River st and slept, 'cos that's where the codiene is. Well,
|
|
slept until it wore off then thrashed around, swearing, until I got
|
|
another one and slept again and woke up in the middle of wednesday. Joss's
|
|
perhaps premature comment of six months ago, that I feel tired, has now
|
|
come true. I do. Full of food I still feel lethargic, I exercised the dog
|
|
today with more of a controlled forward stagger than a walk. I get random
|
|
little episodes of tearfullness - microweeps - and faint zaps of nausea.
|
|
Sitting down to write this stuff hurts now so I'm exercising greater
|
|
brevity, you'll notice (with a sigh of relief, I suspect).
|
|
|
|
May 20
|
|
Eisinger rang up...the PET dudes won't scan me, I apparently am not sick
|
|
enough to meet the criteria under which they will scan me, which makes me
|
|
think they don't get a whole lot of customers. I don't think this matters
|
|
especially. Looking for additional cryptic mets will not really tell me
|
|
anything. It's time to treat them. Chopping them out where we can,
|
|
screwing with their biochemistry where we can't.
|
|
|
|
I ate dinner with Deb again and she's finally, after ten years, revealed
|
|
some stuff I always wondered about. I am glad for her.
|
|
|
|
My skydiving trip on Saturday was cancelled.
|
|
|
|
Brushing my hair this morning wore me out. I breathe hard sometimes in
|
|
response to doing no additional exercise. I somehow managed to spend some
|
|
of the day with Joss, going to bookshops, and the rockpools at Bondi, and
|
|
I fixed a CD player of hers which had about 7 years of dust on the lens.
|
|
It wore me out. I want to ask her to just hug me for hours and not let
|
|
go. I think, and she sez, she's on the mend. Going to Canberra.
|
|
|
|
Everything hurts. It hurts when I breathe in hard. My back hurts.
|
|
Swallowing hurts 'cos Bill's pressed against my oesophageal wall. This
|
|
isn't funny at all. I am too tired to do just about everything. It's
|
|
fucking with my metabolism now, fuckin' cancer, if it stays this way I'll
|
|
be sleep-deprived, caved-in, flattened, too tired and pain-aversive to
|
|
shag; so now I know. Joss and I had our final ever shag on the carpet at
|
|
Autana six weeks ago and I didn't even get off.
|
|
|
|
Eventually I'll be too tired to drive, to feed myself, wash, oh, fuck,
|
|
fuck this sucks. I'd cry but I'm too tired to do that too. The creeping
|
|
fatigue has commenced. This is what kills most cancer patients...
|
|
cachexia, malnutrition.
|
|
|
|
I'm arranging for some ascorbate/alphalipoic and glutathione to come up
|
|
from Melbourne. Dad's acquiring some drip bags, I've screwed an eyehook to
|
|
my bedpost. He hasnt lost his sense of humour ... mum asked him if he'd do
|
|
me a favour and he asked, whats he want, some suppositories?
|
|
|
|
Oh shit man. Funny how one can do as much thinking about this as one likes
|
|
in advance of it happening, but it's the actual physical nausea, pain,
|
|
with no respite, which really nails in the realisation that you're really,
|
|
really sick. It's coming for me. The sky is falling.
|
|
|
|
|
|
May 21.
|
|
4am.
|
|
|
|
Everything hurts when the painkillers wear off and I wake up at 4am and
|
|
thrash around for a few hours. The other smack arrived, so I have to assay
|
|
it, given I was burnt last time. I got in a hot bath at 6am and slept in
|
|
it until about 8, and was hearing this fweep, fweep, fweep, fweep noise in
|
|
my left ear, which is the sound of my carotid artery being deformed and
|
|
the blood turbulently flowing through it, oooh shit. I was going out of my
|
|
mind by 9am, weeping uncontrollably, unable to get anything to shut up the
|
|
pain in my right 'nad and back. So mum said she'd gimme a moggie, to
|
|
sedate me. I SMS'd Carole. A few hours later, thank fuck, Joss came
|
|
around. I can't say how much of a relief this was. She and mum get on
|
|
allright, I think there aren't many people who can bum a fag off mum
|
|
within two hours of meeting them.
|
|
|
|
Fuck. This is such an effort, merely sitting at the keyboard. Maybe I'll
|
|
have to stop.
|
|
|
|
I'll go see Tism on July 9 if I live that long.
|
|
|
|
|
|
Saturday 22nd. All the tranq dad gave me last night got me about three
|
|
hours of sleep. I walked the dog at 5am and barely managed to stagger
|
|
home. I slept in the bath from 6-8am (the heat really masks the pain) but
|
|
then had to get out. The only way to stop my right testi hurting like hell
|
|
was to jump around. It's taking me down very fast.
|
|
|
|
Keith took me to Balmain, Caz shot me up with 30g of ascorbate and I strew
|
|
up a bit. They dropped me at RNS where the med students had a look and
|
|
said things like, difficult dissection, may have to cut the collarbone to
|
|
get at it. I got a cab home and felt like shit again all night. Cookie
|
|
visited, yay. I will miss her.
|
|
|
|
MOnday 24th. My birthday. I go to Edgecliffe to get more ascorbate shot up
|
|
me then to Randwick to scream at my oncologist. I can't walk straight. I
|
|
think I will have to end the log here since I am perpertually weak. I am
|
|
dying. Goodbye.
|
|
|
|
|
|
Broadcast message from root@pred:
|
|
Sending all processes the TERM signal.
|
|
|
|
<predator>
|