Mr. House and Scalpels

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Good Afternoon Folks. I know my blog is a bit of a mess at the moment, but yall are going to have to bear with me. I used to live my life based on a deeply predictable rhythm. I got up around 5:30, and was upstairs around 6 am, having done all of my morning chores like feeding myself, the indoor cats, and the outdoor cats, and even often doing something like starting a load of dishes or laundry. That process is so much slower right now because it takes me quite a bit of time to recover from pretty much every action. I am hoping that, given enough time, I will develop stamina again. I am already doing way better today than I was last week, and a lot of that was jumping through hoops to figure out exactly how much medication I need to maintain my blood pressure at reasonable levels right now. I’ve also found a few things that taste reasonable, and honestly, even kind of hit the spot, so my nutrition side is way more functional as well. My life has often been about figuring out and building routines… and this whole cancer/chemo thing is a giant wrecking ball to one routine and I am having to craft a brand new one out of the pieces that are left behind.

First off, huge props to Quelex for sharing with me some info on how to knock out one of the Gallant Grinding Goals extremely easily. Sure, it was a bit “spendy” because it required some specific popular scarabs, but over the course of four maps, I was able to knock out that bottom objective. I am now slowly poking my way through influenced maps with over 100% Item Quant, and also doing them in Astrolabe maps, so I can be knocking out two objectives at the same time. I am still using the Scarab/Domination/Legion Atlas that I threw together for the previous objective, because it drops plenty of stuff and goes pretty quickly. I figure around the time I ding 100, I will probably knock out the Influenced maps objective and polish off “GGG”. Then it is just down to slowly chipping away at Tyrannical Tiers and Sandswept Survivor, which are both easy enough but simply require a stupid amount of map runs. Atlas Astrolabes should also be finishing up while I am doing the influenced maps, but it mostly just requires me spending chaos to buy the astrolabes.

Mapping has been a really chill experience for me to turn my brain off and just exist. Last night I spent most of the evening watching shows and catching up on various things. I finished up on Season 2 of Fallout, and am pretty pumped with where things left off there. Fallout may be the single best video game adaptation of anything, because it nailed the universe so perfectly… without seeming to feel like it needed to retread ground we have already gone over in the games. After that, I started up Season 2 of Monarch, and thus far, that show continues to give me everything I want in a Godzilla franchise television outing. I am pretty sure that Apple TV might pay more for their shows than other platforms, because the VFX budget here is pretty amazing. At that point, it was getting late, and I figured I should probably turn in early, given that my body is still recovering from everything it is going through. I will probably pick up where I left off tonight and dive into more episodes of Monarch while I chip away at Path of Exile challenges.

Yesterday I talked about Scalpel, but I figured I would give a bit of an update. I have been 100% using it since then and now… I think I can never go back to good ole Awakened POE Trade. Firstly, the whole ability to manipulate your loot filter on the fly is really nice, and the only thing I wish that it did was directly integrate with my profile on Filterblade, so that I could use it to tick up and down the strictness. You can manipulate individual rules and currencies very easily, but yesterday I wanted to just escalate everything up a strictness tier, and still needed to go to Filterblade to do that. The best part about Scalpel for me personally is how good its price prediction tools are, which admittedly are simply relying on Ninja and the Trade API. Awakened POE Trade always tried to make a bit of a fuzzy recommendation, and it was always slightly wrong, and it relied on me looking things up manually most of the time. Scalpel solves those problems and seems like it is just going to keep getting better, the more functionality that is added to it. I need to sort out the Patreon information and give them some money, because I think I will be using this every single league going forward.

I went to my primary care doctor today, which is part of a monthly check-in that we have had since starting tirzepatide. I had to deal with changing how I am getting the meds going forward, but in truth, it should be much easier. I am desperate for a new normal and figuring out what that starts to look like. However, I realized in chatting with my doctor how different my life is going to look by this time next year. In theory, cancer should be far in my rearview mirror, and hopefully, they have pieced me back together into something resembling the original order of how organs connect. I am already down 50 lbs roughly since I started the journey with tirzepatide…. so I am going to be a completely different person than I am today. 2027… I need there to be no crisis of the year… because the death of my spouse last year, and cancer this year… are a decade’s worth of bullshit at once. I really want to travel next year, and figure out how to go see some of the people who matter to me deeply. I’ve lived my life long enough that various folks whom I have known for literal decades, and cannot imagine living my life without, are just amorphous “internet people”.

Anyways! Thanks for bearing with me as I construct a new normal over the course of the next several weeks.

More Challenges and a New Tool

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Good Morning Folks. I’ve made a few more attempts at getting back into Last Epoch, but I find myself in this really odd place. Namely, I do not have enough gold, and am not generating enough gold, to keep buying new tabs for the stuff that I am farming. I could restrict my filters further, but I already am mostly only showing things that are worth picking up. I’ve made it to the point in my build where I either need to just hang it up or farm super hard to perfect my loot. With everything else that I find myself going through, I am leaning way closer to just hanging it up at the moment and calling myself done with Season 4. I’ve made a few more attempts at Aberroth, and there is a phase that I always end up struggling with a bit, and I am just not sure if I have the mental fortitude or general dexterity right now to push through it. As such, I think it might be time for me to just back away from this season. I had a lot of fun, and I got most of my usual stuff accomplished, but similar to the fact that I don’t really enjoy Uber Bosses in POE… this might just be the limits of how much I care about Last Epoch.

As such, I have been farming quite a bit of random map and delve content in Path of Exile, because my build is immortal enough that I can mostly turn my brain off. This is the level of engagement that I need right now, something that is interesting and passes the time, but does not require a lot from me. I knocked out a few more seasonal challenges and upgraded my totem pole a few times. Right now, I am chipping away at a few really long grinds, while also trying to hit level 100. I am roughly halfway through 99 at the moment, and as such am already running Omens of Amelioration just in case I take a random death. I’ve been running an Einhar/Beyond/Ritual map strat that is generating a large number of them just in case, and when I finally hit 100, I am sure I will just cash in any that I have lying around on the market.

Thirty-Four challenges tend to be where I stop every league, and I am at this point, I think 3 challenges away from hitting that. If I never make it back and do any more challenges in this league, I would be happy enough with this totem as my final mark for the league, especially given everything I am going through right now. I know at some point soon, the whole POE2 machine will fire up, and I will start getting interested in whatever is happening with 0.5. I also know that there is a D4 expansion dropping in May that might garner my attention. So in theory, I should probably push through and knock out whatever I can knock out while my focus is available. Everything in my life feels so up in the air right now, and will probably be that way for at least the next four months as I go through cancer infusions.

One thing that is super interesting that just came out is a brand new tool for Path of Exile that essentially replaces all of the third-party tools that folks generally use. It has a price checker, an item recoloring tool, and a way to edit your filters in real time on the fly while you are mapping to add or remove items or shift tiers. I’ve only just started playing with it, but I can see entirely moving away from Awakened POE Trade, especially if this also starts supporting Path of Exile II. The above video is a deep dive into the features of the tool from the developer and his friend, the streamer Aero. Probably the coolest functionality is to be able to shift what tier something is on the fly, which is especially useful if you might care about an item that the general filters would not. I tend to run my filters way too lax for my own good, because I don’t want to miss anything I might at some point care about. However, if I can shift them on the fly, I might actually start using a tool like this to ratchet things down.

One thing I think I should warn you all is that I do not really know what the future of this blog is going to be in the coming months. My life has been turned upside down. “Chemo Brain” is most definitely a thing I am experiencing, and as a result, I am having a bit harder time concentrating and banging out a blog post than I used to. I’ve already had way more gaps in posting than I have in literal years. This is probably going to continue, and I will keep posting whenever I think I can knock something out in a reasonable manner, that does not upset the delicate balance of everything else I have going on in my life. Hopefully, you will be along for this very intermittent journey.

Every Day a New Betrayal

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Good Morning Folks. I realize it has been a while since I last posted, but my world has been turned upside down in the last few days. On some level, I knew this would be hard, but I am not sure I was fully prepared for what it feels like when your body betrays you. Every day has been its own wild ride. I’ve been taking notes because, in theory, I will be going through the same feelings and symptoms at the same time each rotation, and more than anything, that has me dreading the next four months. Can I really do this seven more times? What will even be left of me when I am through the other end? Nothing about this process is easy or comfortable, and it is honestly a struggle to keep sustenance in me. At this point, I am down 50 lbs from my highest weight, and that is just a start. I have no clue where I am going to end up at the end of this journey, because it definitely feels like everything I am going through is accelerating this process, whether or not I want it to. I had a bit of a scare on Friday as my blood pressure meds pushed me down into dangerous territory, so I have completely halted those for the time being and am not sure if and when I will start them back up.

I am not even sure what this means for my blog right now. This is easily the longest gap I have had in writing for a long while, given that it has been five days since my last post. Essentially, all of last week was a wash, and I am not entirely certain how much that will change over time. I keep thinking I will hit a point of equilibrium with the changes my body is going through because they will be cyclical, and that at some point I will be used to the rollercoaster of killing off cells and waiting on new ones to grow back. Every day has been different than the last, but not the same level of better or worse on a progressive scale. I had it in my head that the worst days would be the days actively taking chemo, and then after I finished that, it would be a progressive recovery of functionality, where every day would build upon the previous. That does not appear to be the sort of curve that we are dealing with. Everything just takes so much longer than it normally would, because I keep having to rest between actions. It isn’t that I “can’t” do things… just that the actions bring me to cold sweats and make me need to take pauses in between every micro action. I woke up at 6 am and immediately started getting ready. It was not until around 7:15 that I made it upstairs with breakfast, and everything in between was “do something” and then take a seat for a bit to recover from the thing I just did.

Writing is how I deal with things. I am in part sharing this with you, my readers… because it is my instinct to do so, not necessarily because I want pity or suggestions. I think we have all been around friends and family dealing with cancer in various ways, and this is just my time of life to deal with it. However, the one thing that I can offer is a perspective, as I write through it to process the experience for myself. I’ve always said that I can get used to anything, given enough time and repetition, and I am hoping that this cancer rollercoaster will be one of those things, or that maybe my body will get better at bouncing back. Right now, it is just so broad the impact… because it feels like every single muscle and every single bone… aches at a deeper level than I have ever experienced. I know logically, those are cells dying off and regrowing, and ultimately, I am going to go through this every single round. It feels like when I was a kid and would have massive muscle and bone aches right before a growth spurt. It would also be hilarious if I grew in height from this, but I don’t think it works that way.

On the gaming front, I have cleared all of the Harbingers and am up to Aberroth, but just cannot bring myself to push past and kill him, because I stopped caring enough about it. The build that I am playing is far from immortal, and right now… given my mental bandwidth, I think I need an immortal build to enjoy myself. I could roll a second character and futz around for a while, but I think I might have reached the point where Last Epoch has run its course for me at the moment. There are so many vectors to scale my build on, but they all require massive amounts of effort to accomplish. Were I playing trade, I could just save up and buy whatever I needed, but I do not play trade in this game. So instead, I might just sunset the game for the moment and move on to other things. Maybe if I run across some other build that I just absolutely have to play, I will give it a go, but for the moment, I think I am going to wind things down in Eterra.

That means that I am largely back playing Path of Exile, because the level of engagement works for me. Before the Last Epoch season started, I got my build to a point of almost being immortal, and as a result, I can just go through the motions and collect loot. There are still a bunch of challenges that I want to knock out so that I can upgrade my hideout decoration. I can slowly chip away at these while I am otherwise incapacitated, and feel like I am doing something… while mostly just faffing about. What worries me is that I have four months of this ahead of me. Four months of barely getting by as my body betrays me, and none of this sounds like a good time. I need gaming to keep me sane, but I am going to have to find easy gaming options because I just cannot function at a high level right now. I was naive in that I expected the between week to mostly be getting life back to normal, but so far it is anything but. Maybe as things move forward into the week, it will improve significantly and rapidly, but every day has been a new series of sensations. I am going to realistically also need to start probably forcing myself to work out some, for fear that I lose critical muscle mass each time I kill off cells and regrow them.

Anyways. I am a fucking mess, friends. I will get through this because I have entered the “only way out is through” territory, but holy crap was it not what I was expecting.

Cancer Boy in the Chemo Cubbie

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Good Morning Folks. Yesterday was my first round of Chemotherapy and I took it at this massive cancer treatment center. While the floor was relatively empty, I took a quick photo of the cubicle across from me and specifically timed it when no one else was in the line of sight for privacy reasons. This floor was massive, and I did my math correctly; there are around 120 of these cubicals, and by the time I left around noonish, pretty much every slot was filled. These were serviced by around 30 nurses with a handful of roamers on each side. It is consistently amazing to me just how much cancer is happening in order to support a center like this. The crew continues to be amazing, and there was even a floater roaming around constantly seeing if we needed anything. She made a run through the cubicles with a box full of snacks asking if anyone wanted anything.

The chair shown was way more comfortable than I expected it to be. It reclined a bit and had both built-in heat and built-in massage functionality. At 6’4″, my legs stuck out too far to be able to support the footrest fully extended, so I mostly just sat there in the default configuration. I got to the parking lot of the cancer center around 6:30 am, and they opened up around 6:45. I had to make a trip to the Lab to get my port hooked up, and before that, a quick visit by the finance office to sign some waivers before starting. I was seated on the infusion floor by around 8:30, but the actual process did not take place for a bit. They were waiting on my lab work to get back, and given how many people were actively on the floor at that point, it makes sense why it might have taken a bit of time. Initially was given a bolus of a steroid and a long lasting anti-nauseau med that should, in theory, last for three days before I need to figure out if I have to take any of the prescription meds for the same purpose. After this ran through my system, I had to wait around 30 minutes for everything to cycle before I started the next phase.

I am taking a treatment package known collectively as “Folfox” where the first round is a dose of Oxaliplatin, which takes about 2.5 hours to cycle through. The Oxaliplatin actually goes a bit quicker, but there is a bag of a vitamin mixture that is given at the same time, which took a bit longer to finish up after the first bag was completed. However, they were able to crank up the delivery rate once it was the only bag running. The worst part about all of this is the fact that I had to go to the bathroom simply due to the fact that they had pumped me full of so much fluid. I thought MAYBE I could wait it out, but essentially I had to unhook the pump and wheel it into the restroom and then do my business in as careful of a manner as possible. The pumps themselves were battery-powered, so they would continue to work while unplugged, at least for a short period of time.

The next step was to hook me up to my portable party ball of poison, which would then deliver the fluorouracil (5-FU) over the next 48 hours. Because I got a later start to everything due to labs, I will go back about an hour later on Thursday to unhook things. They carefully fished the line for the take-home chemo edition through the bottom of my shirt so that I could change clothing more easily when I got home. This is not my particular pump, but showing a drained one that I found on the internet, and I then mosaiced out the information on it. Essentially, the elastic bladder around the center of the pump deflates as the medication drips into you, and overnight, mine shows a significant loss in total bulk. You have to maintain a certain elevation of the pump so that things continue to drain successfully. The biggest problem that I have personally had is trying to sleep while this is attached to me, because I am terrified that I will kink a cord, fail to maintain the height difference, or one of the cats will puncture it while they attempt to love on me. This is exacerbated by the fact that they give you some rather lengthy hazmat instructions on what to do if it gets damaged.

When I got home, I played this fun new game of… is it a chemo side effect or am I just exhausted? Due to nerves, I woke up around 3 am yesterday morning and could not get to sleep. So by the time five rolled around, I was pretty freaking dead to the world. I think I went to sleep around 7:30 or at least attempted it, but given the awkward nature of the whole situation, I am not entirely certain how much sleep I actually got. I kept having to get up to pee thanks to the constant trickle of fluids into me throughout the night from the party ball. The other problem that I dealt with was the fact that the Oxaliplatin was no joke. There is a famous side effect where there is a nerve pain reaction to cold, which causes neuropathy, and the more often it triggers, the more likely you are to have it permanently. I had turned up the temperature of the house, but I had to do this again to around 75 when I got home, because picking up a metal water bottle immediately triggered this effect. So what constitutes “cold” is a really broad range of temperatures. I need to get a jug of water that I can have sitting out at room temperature that I can then fill my water bottles from, because I cannot drink tap water at the default cool temperature.

I am awake, but I am honestly not sure how much longer I will be. As I said before, I did not sleep hardly at all last night, and I am not sure how much work I will actually be able to get done today. I normally sleep on my belly when I am getting good restful REM sleep, and I cannot do that while hooked to this pump. I am ultimately going to have to get used to this nonsense because I have seven more rounds of this, and there is no way in hell I am going to survive it if I have to keep going sleepless for 48 hours. A lot of my pre-game jitters were due to the fact that I did not really know what to expect. This whole ordeal is going to rapidly become rote, and that should help considerably with the whole not getting much sleep the night before thing. The hardest part at the moment is my inability to shower, but I plan on taking sponge baths today and tomorrow. I will probably wear a beanie/tuque in tomorrow when I go to get everything unhooked because my hair is already rather jacked up due to sleep and the lack of a shower.

You might ask yourself… Bel, why are you sharing so much information about this process? Well, I figure it serves two purposes. The first is to document this for my own purposes, and the second is to demystify the process for anyone who might be coming along after me with colorectal cancer. There is also this negative side effect of viewing people dealing with cancer as being slightly less than the normal human beings that they are. I write through pretty much everything that I deal with, including the hard things like cancer and the death of my spouse. Seeing me writing about it, I hope makes you realize that I am still the same person I always was, that I just have a new piece of bullshit to deal with. I am really hoping that 2027 is a more chill year because the death of a spouse in 2025 and cancer in 2026 is pretty fucking awful. Right now, more than anything… I just want some damned rest.

The positive is that, for the moment, there is nothing that I can really peg on chemotherapy specifically. I just have a general sense that I was run over by a truck, and feel generically awful. There was a big part of me that expected to feel like I was dying inside once the proper poison started seeping into me. If my math is correct, my low point is going to be Friday, and then after that, it will be an upward trend of recovering pretty much everything. I am hoping by Monday, I will be mostly back to normal or at least well on my way. For this exact moment, there is nothing that I am really experiencing that I cannot account for as general exhaustion and the fact that nature is having sex… and trying to destroy me with allergies. I figure that will change, and I will probably talk about it as it does. I am hoping to be able to at least take a nap today… but I might just take the second half of the day off and try to rest. This whole process sucks… but so far slightly less than I was expecting it to.