Month: July 2013

i didnt look this up recently, so im going on what i recall about it. 

they added some radioactive stuff to my blood. then i waited an hour while it got evenly distributed through my body. then they put me in a big detector machine.

a positron was emitted. the machine recorded on a three dimensional map where that happened. this is repeated maybe a billion times (am i even close on order of magnitude? i have no idea). because the blood is where the radioactivity is, they can create a kind of three dimensional movie of where my blood is going. blood goes places where things are happening. its fuel. so cancer is a thing that is happening. they can kind of find it this way.

now ive been fasting almost 24 hours. i hope they bring some food.

i deliberately ate a lot, the last few days. partly it was an obstinate desire to enjoy the act of eating (despite some pain involved) in the time remaining before my surgery, which will deny me the use of my mouth for some period of time, perhaps several weeks. also, i was "cleaning out" my fridge. 

so i think i stretched my stomach and now, on starvation prior to the pet scan, my stomach is annoyed. i will be ok – this is the beginning of my super amazing cancer diet plan whereby i will finally lose those impossible-to-lose last 10 kg. i was telling about this plan to one of my coworkers the other day and i think it took him a while to realize it was (partly) a joke.

dawn comes early in summer in korea. . . because they dont do daylight savings time. around 445 the brightening window of my stark 10th floor room woke me. i trundled my iv stand over to the window to look out on a misty, overcast ilsan.

the sun has set and i am checked in. curt was much more necessary during that process than i might have wished. a lot of consents to be signed, medical histories to be compiled. . . all far beyond my rudimentary korean ability. even curt had no idea some of the medical terminology they were using.

i have no wifi so i will post via emails for now. 

i got an iv in my arm. . this hospital room is much quieter than my apartment . . . no street noise much less neighbor noise. i hadnt thought about how accustomed to ambient noise ive become. 
pet scan tomorrow, surgery on thursday.

I am in waiting mode. At some point today, I will get a phone call telling me to go to the hospital to check in.
I made a map of points of interest in Ilsan. I won’t give a specific address – the National Cancer Center (국립암센터) is a major landmark in Ilsan and the city’s largest employer as far as I know. If you’re coming from out of town to see me, just walk from either Jeongbalsan subway station (Line 3 = Orange Line) or Pungsan subway station (Gyeongui Line = Aqua Line), or hop in a taxi and say “National Cancer Center” – the place is about 1 km from each station.
On my map (made from googlemaps), the green star in the southeast is the National Cancer Center. The purple star is Jeongbalsan subway station (which is basically “downtown” Ilsan) and the blue star is Pungsan subway station. The red star at the top is KarmaPlus Academy, where I work, and the brown star on the west is my apartment. The large green area in the center is Jeongbalsan Park and the green area with blue is the famous Ilsan Lake Park.

No, this is not about prognosis. It’s just the weather forecast.
I awoke to the sound of thunder, and checking the weather, I see that the monsoon appears to have arrived.
The phone rang.
I talked on the phone with my sister. My sister has been sitting vigil with her best friend, who has cancer, of all things. Yes, cancer. Her friend had exhausted all treatment options and has been in what they call end-of-life palliative care. And I swear what follows is true, because it sounds like a scene in a novel.
I was talking to my sister, about this and that, serious things – what I would do if scenario x, scenario y – the complicated aspects of undergoing major surgery as a foreigner in Korea, how would power-of-attorney work, who advocates for me, etc. These are difficult things.
And then my sister said, “OK. Jared. I love you, but I have to go. My friend just died.”