Carrots, Eggs, and Coffee

My buddy Sara from the support group posted this a few days ago. She had just come back from a doctor's appointment, and found this in her e-mail, and though she should share. I think it's worth sharing.

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A young woman went to her mother and told her about her life and how things were so hard for her. She did not know how she was going to make it and wanted to give up. She was tired of fighting and struggling. It seemed as one problem was solved, a new one arose.

Her mother took her to the kitchen. She filled three pots with water and placed each on a high fire. Soon the pots came to boil. In the first she placed carrots, in the second she placed eggs, and in the last she placed ground coffee beans. She let them sit and boil without saying a word.

In about twenty minutes she turned off the burners. She fished the carrots out and placed them in a bowl. She pulled the eggs out and placed them in a bowl. Then she ladled the coffee out and placed it in a bowl. Turning to her daughter, she said, "Tell me what you see."

"Carrots, eggs, and coffee," the daughter replied.

Her mother brought her closer and asked her to feel the carrots. She did and noted that they were soft. The mother then asked the daughter to take an egg and break it. After pulling off the shell, she observed the hard boiled egg.

Finally, the mother asked the daughter to sip the coffee. The daughter smiled at its rich taste. The daughter then asked, "So what does it all mean?"

Her mother explained that each of these objects had faced the same adversity: boiling water. But each reacted differently. The carrot went in strong, hard, and unrelenting. However, after being subjected to the boiling water, it softened and became weak. The egg had been fragile. Its thin outer shell had protected its liquid interior, but after sitting through the boiling water, its inside became hardened. The ground coffee beans were unique, however. After they were in the boiling water, they had changed the water.

"Which one are you?" she asked her daughter. "When adversity knocks on your door, how do you respond? Are you a carrot, an egg or a coffeebean?"

Think of this: Which am I? Am I the carrot that seems strong, but with pain and adversity do I wilt and become soft and lose my strength?

Am I the egg that starts with a malleable heart, but changes with the heat? Did I have a fluid spirit, but after a death, a breakup, a financial hardship or some other trial, have I become hardened and stiff? Does my shell look the same, but on the inside am I bitter and tough with a stiff spirit and hardened heart?

Or am I like the coffee bean? The bean actually changes the hot water, the very circumstance that brings the pain. When the water gets hot, it releases the fragrance and flavor. If you are like the bean, when things are at their worst, you get better and change the situation around you. When the hour is the darkest and trials are their greatest, do you elevate yourself to another level?

How do you handle adversity? Are you a carrot, an egg or a coffee bean?

The happiest of people don't necessarily have the best of everything; they just make the most of everything that comes along their way.

May you have enough happiness to make you sweet, enough trials to make you strong, enough sorrow to keep you human and enough hope tomake you happy.

May we all be coffee.

Happy Birthday, Peter

My little boy is not so little. He turns 13 today.


Kind of strange having a teenager in the house, though he's been practicing his eye-rolling and grunt-responding for a while now, so we've been able to build up to it.


In his honor, I present a short video called "Peter, Scottish Warrior King."


I made this video with Peter in June 1997, when he was about 7 weeks old. Isabel had absolutely no knowledge of what I was doing. I took Peter into the bedroom and closed the door. Every few minutes, she heard me laughing or Peter crying a little, but she mostly left me alone.


It was a very warm, sticky June day in Kentucky, and being in the closed-off bedroom didn't make it any more pleasant. Which isn't to say I didn't have a good time.


(Sure, this post is really about celebrating Peter, but if I may, I'd like to point out that this video reveals some of the early promise that came to full flower in my more recent films, The Money Mobile and Cake Chief, don't you think?)


Anyway, a very happy birthday to our Peter. He and Isabel spent yesterday in New York City. where Peter's All-State Band was supposed to give an outdoor concert on the plaza at Lincoln Center, but got rained out. Today he's got a baseball game for one team and a practice for another right after that. He's doing great things, and we're very proud of him. He's going to make a great teenager.


Enjoy the video.

Best Cancer Hospitals

US News and World report has published their annual hospital rankings, and the results are good news for me.


In their rankings for Cancer Hospitals, Yale-New Haven comes in at #21 in the country. Not too shabby. Even better is that Sloan-Kettering in New York is #2, Hopkins in Baltimore is #3, Dana Farber in Boston is #5, Mass General is #7, and Brigham and Women's in Boston is #15. Throw in a couple of hospitals in Philly, and a couple more in NYC, and I'm about a 5 hour drive from a dozen of the best cancer hospitals in the country. Which is very cool.


US News does rankings for lots of specialties, and it's always interesting to see what they think. Of course, my main concern at the moment isn't the proctology rankings, but it's nice to know they exist.

Happy Earth Day

It's the fortieth anniversary of the first Earth Day today.


It's also the twentieth anniversary of the first Earth Day that Isabel and I shared.


Seems insignificant, but it has some lasting memories for us.


Boston celebrated Earth Day that year (1990) with a march from Kenmore Square to the Esplanade, along Storrow Drive. Isabel and I had been dating for about a month at that point, though we'd known each other since the previous August. We hadn't told anyone at work that we were dating, because each of us had recently turned down another co-worker's affections with the excuse that we didn't date co-workers. So we had to keep it a secret.


Earth Day that year was a beautiful spring Saturday, and we marched with a couple of hundred others, behind a young man in a tie die shirt and leather vest with a bullhorn, chanting "Ho ho! Hey hey! Every day is Earth Day!" Except once he got distracted and said "Hey hey! Ho ho! Earth day is every....Um...Ho ho...." Even now, whenever we hear anyone saying that "hey hey ho ho" chant, we laugh and repeat the bullhorn guy's mess up. Ah, memories.


When we reached the Esplanade that day, Isabel and I sat under a tree and listened to whoever the speaker was, telling us about the environment. Someone took our picture as we sat under that tree, holding hands. Which we were used to, frankly, because people used to take our picture all the time. We were a damn cute couple. We overheard the photographer telling someone else that he worked for the Boston Herald.


And then we remembered that this meant there was a chance that everyone at work would see a picture of us holding hands. Such a picture would definitely end up on a bulletin board outside our office, because we figured this was definitely going in the newspaper -- we were that cute a couple.


Fortunately, the Herald went with a picture of the guy with the bullhorn. We were safe.


Until we got caught making out at a party a month later.


Anyway, to celebrate Earth Day, here is a link to a video version of Dr. Seuss's classic, The Lorax. The book was published in 1971, and the video linked here appeared on TV the following year. It's a great video, co-produced by Friz Freleng, the former Warner Brothers cartoon director, and featuring the vocal talents of Eddie Albert, who had just finished his run on Green Acres and was a couple of years away from his brilliant portryal of the evil prison warden in The Longest Yard.


Enjoy the day. It's a beautiful one here.

Good Visit

Had my 6 week follow-up wth Dr. R today. Things look good.

Bloodwork, as always, was "rock solid." No signs of anemia, no low (or high) white blood cell count.

No new nodes popping up anywhere.

The swelling in the leg looks good to him. He's never measured it or anything, but he thinks it looks like it's a little smaller, a little softer, and a little less red than the last time he saw it. So it seems like maybe the Rituxan kept working even a little bit more, after the CT scan in February.

He was pleased enough to say I could come back in 3 months, rather than 6 weeks, which puts me back on my old schedule.

Before I left, we talked about next steps. I always like to know what's coming next. I asked him about Rituxan maintenance. We had talked about another 4 rounds of Rituxan six months after the first treatment. He said he has mixed feelings about it. Rituxan maintenance has shown some benefit for more aggressive lymphomas when the first treatment was chemotherapy; it tends to extend the benefits of chemo. The benefit for indolent lymphomas, particularly when the first treatment was not chemo, is less clear. It wouldn't be harmful to do more Rituxan -- it just might not do any good. He said he was going to think about it, and then made the appointment for two and half months rather than three, so if we did do more Rituxan, we could fit it in before the fall semester starts.

If it was up to me -- and, really, let's be honest: it is up to me -- I would (will) go with four more rounds of Rituxan this summer. I might have skipped it if I had gotten a complete response the first time, but if I still have some swollen nodes, why not give it a shot? It won't cause any real long-term side effects, and it's very tolerable. Dr R seemed more concerned about inconveniencing me than anything else. I say it's a pretty darn good use of my time, ya know?

So that's where we are: a good visit, with more evidence of success with the Rituxan, and a conversation at the end of June about whether or not to keep watching and waiting, or to try another bit of treatment.

A good visit indeed.

Cool Research

I don't have a link for a full article, but this description of the research is called, straightforwardly, "Compound that Kills Lymphoma Cells Discovered," seems very promising.

Researchers have discovered a compound that disrupts the connection that causes certain lymphoma cells to grow. They don't name the type of lymphoma, but I'm guessing it's Diffuse Large B Cell (DLBCL), an aggressive type. I could probably research the protein that they mention to find out for sure, but it's good news even if it isn't about Follicular NHL specifically. All of this research opens up new avenues, given the kind of targeted therapy that this involves.

It's a short article, but there's good stuff in there. I like that they describe the process, looking at so many compounds and then narrowing it down to just a few that showed promise.

Of course, this is all pre-clinical-trial research that hasn't left the lab yet, so it will be years before we even know if it's effective. Seems safe, according to the researchers -- they claim it's non-toxic, which is great.

Certainly something to keep an eye on.

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I see Dr. R on Monday for a six-week, post-treatment check up. I feel pretty good, so I'm not anticipating any bad news (though, of course, you never know). The nodes that had been active, that were close enough to the surface for me to feel, haven't gotten any bigger since the Rituxan shrank them. And I haven't felt any new ones pop up anywhere. The tricky part will be the deeper ones that I can't feel, though I haven't felt any pressure anywhere in my abdomen to indicate that they are causing trouble again.

I will update you all late Monday or early Tuesday.

Busy, busy

My goodness, it's been a busy week. Almost too busy to post on the blog. Almost. But -- then I jinxed myself last week when I said my computer was fixed, and it turned out it wasn't, and now I've had a busy week AND no laptop and thus not much time to post to the blog.

As I said last time, Catherine and I went to the Father-Daughter dance at her school on Friday night. This is the fourth one we've been to, and she looks forward to it every year. Mostly for the snacks that they lay out, the corsage I get her, and the opportunity to buy me anew tie to match her dress, but also so she can spend time with me. I assume.

We laso go out to dinner together before the dance, and my favorite memory from all of these dances was from the first one, when she was four. She chose Applebees as our dinner location. When we arrived, there were four waitresses at the hostess' station, and all of them when on about how beautiful she looked; an older couple nearby said the same thing; and then the hostess made over her too before taking us to our table. When our waitress came to the table, she asked us what we'd like to drink, and then left to get them in a rush. Catherine leaned over to me and whispered, "Dad -- she didn't tell me how beautiful I look." It's tough to be a princess.

Catherine and I actually dance quite well together. Lots of spinning, the occasional dipping, and a dynamite two-person robot dance. Very Shields and Yarnell, if your memory goes back that far.

Anyway, we had a great time.

We got home and went straight to bed, because we had to leave at 5:30am Saturday to bring Peter down to Washington, DC to a Youth Leadership Conference that he was invited to. This is his first extended time away from home, and he has been looking forward to it for a while.

The conference takes advantage of its DC location, bringing the kids (who are all 12 or 13 years old, from all over the country) to various spots in and around the city to talk about leadership qualities like courage, determination, and problem-solving while thinking and learning about real-life examples. Peter's interested in history and politics, so this was a good thing for him to experience.

Frankly, I didn't expect to hear from him at all for a week, but he's been good about texting us a couple of times a day. So we get things like "Harpers Ferry is awesome! John Brown looks like he was insane!" and "Here's a pic of the Canadian Enbassy! Woot!"

So he's having a good time, as far as we can tell. (We know that "woot!" means that something is good.) I think if he was going to feel uncomfortable about being away, it's probably not an issue because he has family so close. He's got the "special phone number" just in case there's an emergency -- he knows the Secret Service will pop up from out of nowhere to take care of any problems.

He'll be back on Saturday.

And I'll get back to cancer-related posts very soon. Some exciting research going on.