Venture Adventure

Stealing from the title of a classic movie, I’ve been silent for almost a month.  And, in part, it’s because I went deep…. into a blue funk.  I was tired, and down, and depressed.  And was feeding on the anger and depression of my wife, who’s been struggling for a bit with her job.  And then, she took last week off.  For the first few days, she hid, spending the entire day and night watching Japanese anime downloaded from the net.  She watched the entire Monster story, all 76 episodes, as well as many other long-lost favorites.

Since it was her first break in a long while, and the first time we’ve had time to spend together in many months, I decided to take the week off as well.  And it turned out to be a good thing, as we finally got more information on my mom’s cancer.  My mom was diagnosed with peripheral T-cell lymphoma.  This rare (7% of all lymphomas) cancer has an untreated 5-year survival rate of 0%, and a treated 5-year survival rate of 20%, which are truly horrible statistics.  The good news is that, for some as yet unknown reason, my mother is not sick.  In fact, the swelling in the lymph nodes has shrunk.  There is a possibility that she may enter a clinical trial on a modification of the standard CHOP treatment.

Unfortunately for me, however, is the fact that I don’t deal with this type of news very well.  For the first few days, I was “unaffected”, or so I claimed.  In reality, I was just keeping all my feelings bottled up and ignoring it completely.  On about the 4th day after getting the news, I lost it.  I spent the morning in bed crying.  After talking with my wife about it for a long time, I’ve finally come to terms with it, and am now functioning much better.

So, this week sees me coming up from the deep, and starting to talk and work again.

Two weeks ago, I received the call you never want to receive.

My dad: “Your mother is going into the hospital.  The doctors are concerned about complications from her knee replacement surgery.”

After two hips and a knee, this knee replacement was supposed to be her last.  About 6 weeks later, she was running a fever of 103, and was quite sick.  The doctors were concerned about a possible embolism, or infection.  So I flew out to the east coast (thank you, Jet Blue).

While I was winging my way eastward, the doctors did a thoracic MRI, looking for an embolism.  Instead, they found really inflamed and swollen lymph nodes.  They did a biopsy of the lymph nodes, and then gave antibiotics.

The fever finally cleared, my mom started to feel better, and the doctors released her from the hospital.  The infectious disease doctors found nothing, so they declared the problem lymphoma, and made an appointment for my mother with the oncologist.  The hard part was that we couldn’t find out pathology results.  After a few days, they said that they were having a hard time in the lab, so they sent a sample to NIH.

Just this morning, my mother went back for a post-op follow-up with the surgeon who performed the biopsy.  The surgeon said that indications now are leading to a conclusion of a benign problem, rather than a cancerous problem.  The surgeon was surprised that we still didn’t have lab results, and immediately got on the phone to put peoples toes to the fire.  While we’re still not sure, things are looking better and better.

Now that I’m back home, and have better news, I’m finally able to get back to working on my startup and my life in general