Living with Cancer

Wow, this article on FOX today absolutely stopped me in my tracks.

http://www.foxnews.com/health/2012/01/26/newer-stronger-chemo/?intcmp=features

I can relate completely with this article.  It discusses exactly how I feel.  Replace breast cancer with colon cancer, 10 years with 9 years and Abraxane with my milder Camptosar and you have me.

I’ve had the same worry, dealt with the same depression, made the same deal with the “universe”.  I too face so few days of feeling well enough to function, with a quality of life that is pretty severely low.  So desperately have I hoped for some other way to attack my disease that I’ve wept and felt the despair of knowing my current regimen is the BEST I can hope for – it only gets worse from here if the current treatment doesn’t succeed.  I have read the technical descriptions of how the medicines I take work, and then wondered how I even function as well as I do after understanding what it is doing to my body.  Damaging DNA and RNA and destroying a cell’s ability to divide?  If that doesn’t sound like slow death I don’t know what does.  And that’s the treatment, not the disease!

I’ve faced the hope, anticipation and dejection of multiple treatments and surgeries, each of which offered a possibility of remission and each of which failed.  I see the body in the mirror that even my oncologist jokes “looks like a roadmap” from all the scars on the abdomen.

Yes, I’ve lost the hair, but let’s face it – it was going anyway and it’s not nearly the issue for the guys that it is for the girls.  At least on that front I can actually smile about it, and it’s really only that I have next to no eyebrows that bugs me because it makes me look creepy.  Er…creepier.

Anyway, it’s not that frequently that I read something shared from the heart that I can relate to so completely that I felt it could have been written about me.  That’s what this article is.  It hits very close to home.

Meet the New Year, Same as the Old Year

With apologies to Pete Townsend or whoever….

I had hopes that as I “saw 2011′s taillights fading in the distance”, as a friend put it, that things would begin to be a little better.  So many things happened last year of a disruptive or costly nature that it was nigh overwhelming.  I was so glad to see the new year with such high hopes that things would get back to some kind of “normal”.

Apparently not.

We’ve already suffered another mess at the house.  Though technically occuring in 2011, we couldn’t do anything about it until 2012 so it sort of spans years.  Our master bedroom shower is going to have to be completely rebuilt.  The tile guy has already wrecked out the old tile, and today he and a plumber were to arrive to do a bit of plumbing and start the re-install.  That is a several day job so we had set up the logistics for how we were going to get them in each day they worked.  Today I get a call from them while I’m on a conference call at work – they cannot get in.  I have to drive out there to let them in, and find the reason they cannot get in is the power is out at the house.

Really?

This is getting beyond absurd.  I mean every little thing is cascading from a mole hill into the proverbial mountain.  Enough already!  Every time I hear a sound at the house I cringe and think “Now what?”.

For my sanity’s sake, things have GOT to turn around.

Stinky Wet Carpet

Tearing out the carpet in a room is a bit of a chore.

Tearing out all the carpet in a house is a big chore (six rooms, a hall and a utility room).

Tearing out all the carpet in a house that has flooded…priceless!

It stinks.  It’s sopping wet, and the padding is like a huge sponge.  When you try to pick it up or move it, water water everywhere!  Being wet must make it harder to cut into managable strips, too, because the brother-in-law was doing yeoman work but wore out multiple razor blades.

On top of everything else, the house was not empty of furniture yet, so we had to move a LOT of stuff around or throw it out just to get to the soaked carpet.

I am still amazed we got all this carpet out in four hours.  I’ll never look at carpet the same again.

Yet Another Problem at Pops House That John Gets to Check Into…

For what has man for all his labor, and for the striving of his heart with which he has toiled under the sun?  For all his days are sorrowful, and his work burdensome; even in the night his heart takes no rest.

Ecclesiastes 2:22-23

Some Day

Some day I won’t have to be on chemo any more.

It may be because I’m in temporary remission, that I’m cured, or that I died.

Any way it happens, I’ll be glad for it.

December High School Football

Good luck tonight Mustangs.  I don’t think I’m going to be up to making that trip, but I’ll be cheering you guys on.  Best of luck to you and here’s hoping the game with Monahans is a great one!

Never Cut What You Can Untie

I have a copy of Daily Guideposts which a friend gave me.  I do read it daily, or if I miss a day I make it up.  If you’re not familiar with it, it is a daily devotional.

The October 13 article was about running into knots while knitting by a novice knitter, who after fretting about what to do to remove the knot gets help from a knitting expert friend who manages to untie the knot.  The novice was surprised the fix didn’t involve cutting the thread.

Applied to personal relationships, the author felt there was the posibility of recovering some of her difficult relationships rather than cutting them.

Knitting isn’t a topic that would normally have appealed to me, but this was a nice little note today.  Might apply to me.

Steve Jobs Quote

“Remembering that I’ll be dead soon is the most important tool I’ve ever encountered to help me make the big choices in life. Because almost everything — all external expectations, all pride, all fear of embarrassment or failure — these things just fall away in the face of death, leaving only what is truly important. Remembering that you are going to die is the best way I know to avoid the trap of thinking you have something to lose. You are already naked. There is no reason not to follow your heart.” —Stanford University commencement speech, June 2005

Well put.  Rest in peace.

Aggies One More Time

So sad to see the annual game against the Aggies probably come to and end this weekend.  That game has so many fond memories for me.

Zack’s pick six for the shocking win.  My son told my Dad after the game that I’d gone crazy.

Rojo’s big catch from Graham to pull out another win.

Wes’s monunental punt return for six (my son still remembers how much I scared him when I started screaming in the barn…he was with me and had no idea what I’d gone nuts over until I explained later…LOL).

Blackshear putting an end to the “12th man kickoff team” by driving a stake into it just before halftime.

All the way back to Donnie Anderson’s TD off the lateral that Donnie called for as the huddle broke.  No, I’m not that old, but I’ve seen highlights of it and read about it and it’s part of my aggie/Raider lore.

The friendly banter between TSO and aTm. 

Goal post invasion prompts Aggies to fight one another.  Claiming a Tech fan attack.  And finding out the claimant was a high ranking Aggie beaurocrat.  Funny, in an Aggie sort of way.

Medical Billing Complexity and ICD-10

I read an article recently written by someone who agrees with me that the medical billing process in this country is out of whack, FAR out of whack.

Here is the full article:  http://www.healthcarepayernews.com/content/challenges-icd-10-implementation

A couple of quotes I’d like to point out.

First, a comment made by one of the authors co-workers about the system.

Our health care system already has twice the administrative overhead of other advanced nations. We arguably have the most complex medical reimbursement system in the world. ICD-10 makes it worse.

I am no expert on the world’s medical billing systems, but I have a fair insight into this country’s and it is a behemoth.  There are far too many levels of administration involved in the process.  The typical consumer has no idea all the hoops that are being jumped through in order to get a claim paid, and when any questions arise about a bill there are a dizzing array of participants involved which may have to be dealt with in order to address the issue.  The entire process is so convoluted it stretches credulity.  Most of the participants in the process bear a burden to the payer for reducing costs; very little of the process addresses cost for the consumer.  The industry’s focus on “consumer driven healthcare”, a mantra you hear often from bureaucrats who discuss the issue, is really nothing more than code for “higher costs to the consumer”.

Unfortunately, there are too many activities within and outside the government whose livelihood depends on perpetuating this complex system. It is akin to the Internal Revenue Code.

From my observations of the system, this quote is true.  If the average consumer were to be given a short class on the medical billing process and exposed to the various participants in the system and what goals these participants have, I think they would agree as well.  A typical claim may have to pass through four different types of entities, and through mulitple cycles of some of them, just to get paid.  And that assumes care managment is not involved.  However, as with the IRS code, these entities don’t want to see the process simplified because that would likely eliminate their reason for existing.

When a claim is filed by the provider, it enters a “black hole” of claims processing into which the consumer has little to no insight, and for which the consumer has almost no understanding.  Months later in many cases the claim is finally administered.  Now this article I quoted claims that not only is the actual transition from ICD-9 to ICD-10 going to be an expensive and painful endeavor, but when it’s done we’ll have an even more complex claim billing system than before.

Wonderful.