So remember when I had cancer?

It's been gone since January, but I am still in recovery mode. My beard is still too scraggly and my saliva glands haven't totally come back (though in the last few weeks, I've been able to eat sandwiches and pizza that I couldn't eat before).

But none of that matters. What matters is that cancer ruined my golf game. Instead of shooting in the 70s and hitting 250 yard drives, I was shooting in the high 80s and low 90s with drives that fell short of 200 yards.

It was like a preview of what my game will be like when I'm in my 80s.

Well, in the last month I've made a recovery where it really mattered. I am shooting in the 70s again, including a 74 yesterday from the blue (back) tees at Sundale. My drives are where they used to be.

My short game, which I had lost, has returned. I know that because when I made some recovery shots yesterday, my opponent got mad at me. That's a wonderful feeling.

The point of this blog is that it took about eight months for my strength and game to return. Chemo and radiation can't knock you down forever.

My beard and spit can wait a little more if they want to. Playing good golf overshadows those pesky maladies.

Fairways and greens forever. And Stand up to Cancer (what a great ad).

 

I long for the days when we made sanctimonious decisions and did what we in the newspaper business felt was right and good for you.

Now we listen to you and we make bad decisions.

One of them is getting rid of the comic strip Sherman's Lagoon. This ranks up there, although not quite as egregious, as when we got rid of Doonsebury.

We relied on the public input for that too.  The deal with Doonsebury is even if most of the public didn't want it, it was far too important for the people who did.

My problem with public input is it is so far away from getting a representative cross sample.  I'm tempted to say that when we do a comic poll, what you get is whiners.

Sherman's Lagoon is a delightful strip about sharks, turtles and crabs who make fun of people.

One strip had the friendly shark solve a dictator problem by eating him. Another recent one was when the crab learned that his mail-order ministry license came with a record club membership.

If anyone here had done the correct thing, which is to ask me what comic strip should go, I would have gladly suggested Get Fuzzy whose humor, if any, is so obscure, I shake my head every time I read it.

I just couldn't let this latest travesty go without a comment.

 

 

 

 

 

I'm not a customer of Blockbuster videos, but I may soon be.

I've long thought that videos should be priced by the number of days you have them, not the $4-plus charge for four days. I typically watch a movie the night I rent it and am ready to take it back the next day.

So Blockbuster is trying a plan for $2 per day on new releases and $1 a day for old releases. Hollywood Video and Movie Gallery should take note.

 

 

 

George Carlin, one of the all time funny comedians, died yesterday of a heart attack.

What I liked about his humor is that he made the truth funny.

In his planet earth routine, he talked about all the people who worry about endangered species, noting that more than 90 per cent of all species ever created are extinct. "We didn't kill'em all," he said.

In the above linked story, he asks,  "Why do they lock gas station bathrooms?  Are they afraid someone will clean them?"

His legacy lives on on You Tube. I recommend you take a peek. Don't worry about the seven dirty words -- they're all in there, living on happily ever after.

 

 

 My throat cancer was zapped and drugged to smithereens, and it is all gone.
That’s the result of a PET scan which was run this week at the Truxtun Radiology Medical Group.
This crowning glory came after four of the most miserable months I have ever spent, and about $80,000 in medical costs.
Some may ask whether I’m worth it.
Well, if I colored my hair, I’d use Clairol because Heather Locklear and I are  worth it.
 And now I’m an official cancer survivor. 
To briefly recap, here’s what I survived:
A cancer lump that went from my right tonsil halfway up my neck. It’s called squamous cell carcinoma of the right tonsil. We found it in late August.
Three chemotherapy sessions at  Dr. Anthony Ciarolla’s office knocked me flat on my back.
I got sick a lot. I had near zero energy. And you don’t want to know about my potty habits.
I had eight weeks  (five days a week) of radiation from Dr. Dean Davis at the Florence Wheeler Cancer Center.
That turned my throat into a war zone. At times I could barely talk. Everytime I swallowed it hurt. Turns out you swallow fairly often during the day.
A tube was surgically inserted in my stomach because I couldn’t swallow food. So my wife fed me six cans of Ensure a day for about two months.
After the treatment it was yanked out. Ouch.
I lost my tastebuds and my saliva glands. I got the tastebuds back but the saliva glands are expected to be gone for a year.
Thus, I can’t eat thick bread or pizza.
 During the worst of it, a slight arm movement while I was in bed might be enough to toss a few cookies in the porcelain bowl.
I was on a regimen of expensive drugs that didn’t always work. And they plugged me up.
You just have to endure suffering because you don’t have a choice.
I’m not recommending this disease to anyone.
What kept me going was my wife, Mary, who literally kept me alive.
And the support from my family, friends and church.
Plus, Dr. Ciarolla got giddy when the tumor shrunk a lot. And Dr. Davis reported in January he couldn’t detect any more cancer.
The PET scan, which came about three months after my last treatment, was to determine if it all worked.
PET doesn’t mean I’m a cute little puppy. It stands for Positron Emission Tomography, and it is a form of nuclear medicine.
There’s this stainless steel cylindrical container that’s packaged in a much larger container, all for the protection of radioactive material. (Thus the name nuclear medicine)
After an hour, the injection sends out gamma rays in my body, which are read by this big doughnut hole machine I go through.
And all that told the doctors I was cancer free.
Well, how much did that cost — that process to keep me alive.
Dr. Davis and a couple scans at Mercy cost $31,300.
The chemo cost about $22,600.
The drugs cost $6,300.
 An emergency room visit and the stomach tube procedure cost about $9,000.
The doctors on the stomach tube cost about $1,000.
That adds up to $70,200. There were a few other costs that I couldn’t get — a bunch of blood work, cartons of Ensure and the removal of the tube — but I’m guessing they were no more than $10,000.
Is my life worth $80,000? At a bare minimum, I say.
Any other opinion ain’t worth a dime. 






 

Major news in my post-cancer recovery saga — my saliva glands won't work for a year and my stomach tube was popped out the other day.

So, just when I was able to eat again following my throat cancer radiation treatment — which left my throat like a raw open sore zone — I get the news that my saliva glands won't work for about a year.

This means I can't spit on people even if I want to. And it means big sluggish food like sour dough rolls and pizza won't be on the menu cuz I got no internal lubricants to wash them down the throat.

But I can eat anything that I can cut up into small bites, including as I did the other day, a medium-rare rib eye steak. I mention the steak because the last taste buds to come back after the radiation are the glutamic acid which makes steak taste good. And boy did it taste good.

So with this restoration of eating through my mouth, instead of those six cans of Ensure a day through my stomach tube (as I did for nearly two months), I was anxious to get my stomach tube out.

It wasn't good for my golf swing; it leaked red mucus that hardened on my upper tummy, and it was a low-grade hurt  as the tube  tugged on me.

I called the office which put it in (I'm not going to name the office because I'm mad at them). A woman said I had to take a swallow test first. I suggested that was silly because I had been eating for two weeks and my swallowing seemed just fine.

I even tried to get out of the test, which had to be performed at Memorial Hospital, but I couldn't.

It seemed less silly when speech pathologist, Charles Ellis, explained that what they look for is trace amounts which get diverted to the lungs. So I might not even feel that for awhile.

He had these swallow substances — a thin milky sort of drink, what appeared to be Gerber's apple sauce, pudding on a graham cracker and a thicker pudding. All of it went down the right hatch.

A couple days later, I went back to Memorial Hospital where I put a hospital gown on and relaxed on a bed until the doctor came in to yank my tube out.

Now, I have to tell you, that I was apprehensive about this process. Stuff from my stomach leaked into the tube on a regular basis. I presume I have this quarter-inch hole in my stomach and therefore, pulling something out, might bring a squirt with it.

I shared this with my golfing buddies. They offered for free to yank it out — either in my back swing or as I was putting.

But it turns out a doctor is needed for this and he's ready with big bandages to sop up any spillage.

As I write this, I have a 4x4 bandage with no apparent stain tapped generously to my stomach hair. The doctor explained that I would feel some pressure.  I did, but it only was uncomfortable for a few seconds.

The part of the tube that was in my tummy was like a little funnel. It was squeezable and like a little mouse that scrunches up to get through a small hole, it came right out without a big mess.

I am very happy it is gone. I don't particularly like man-made appendages on my body. After a few days of changing these big bandages on my stomach, I presume I will have a regular looking abdomen.

I myself won't be regular looking until my beard grows back. I had to shave it off because it was scraggly and made me look like a cancer patient.

This is a big deal to me because I've had the beard since 1974.  It hid one of my less desirable features, a weak chin.

And now as a result of my cancer treatment, I have this loose fitting wattle on my throat. That too will hang around for about six months.

All this makes me look funny. Well, I would rather be funny than look funny. But I have no choice. There's no instant gratification in cancer recovery.

Two momentous things happened yesterday in my post-cancer recovery.

Despite a fair amount of fear and apprehension, I went to the dentist to get my teeth cleaned and it wasn't so bad.

My oral hygienist, Nancye, who in late November appropriately postponed my cleaning due to chemotherapy issues, used a sonic cleaner with warm water that made the whole experience much easier.

I swallowed the warm water with no problem at all, which gave me the inspiration to try to eat food last night. I have been unable — due to a ravaged throat — to eat food through my mouth since Dec. 8.

So for the last two months and five days I've been eating Ensure, a liquid protein milkshake about six times a day through my stomach tube. My wife pumps it in me and I only taste it when I burp.

I don't particularly get hungry and this tube thing isn't very satisfying. But I continue to breathe and do other regular bodily functions.

Speaking of which, I was a little curious how having nothing but a liquid diet could result in what the medical profession calls bowel movements. The less educated call them poop or tinkies.

So I asked my chiropractor friend and golfing buddy, Stuart Sultze. He essentially didn't know. So I told him I would ask a real doctor. (I've been waiting for years to use that line on him).

I asked my nurse, Doris, at the cancer center. She said that Ensure has a lot of fiber and that my body naturally sucks out the liquid, leaving a solid substance. The medical profession calls those bowel movements.

I've long wondered why they don't call them intestine movements. Well it turns out that's what a bowel is. (I just looked this up in a dictionary for the first time in my life).

Moving right along, I decided last night that if warm water went down well, maybe food would. My wife was cutting up one of these cooked chickens we get from Vons and I tried eating a few bites.

They were little bites but they went down pretty well. No searing pain.

She put these previously cooked chicken pieces in this mixture of noodles, cheese, corn and black beans. And then cooked all that together.

When it was done, I put a little of it in a bowl and cut up everything into baby bites and put it in the left side of my mouth.  The right side of my tongue was hurting.

So I chewed up this delicious mix and down the hatch it went. And it didn't hurt. Cool.

With my tongue hurting and all, and my throat still a little raw, I'm not piling food into my hatch at any significant clip. In fact, I've had 4 cans of Ensure today.

But I will eat more and I am absolutely delighted that I'm able to taste it and it tastes good. (Previous columns have noted that eight weeks of radiation to my throat was not only transforming my throat into a war zone, but killing taste buds.)

Obviously, my little taste buds are fighting back with new growth. Just like some of my hair is coming back on both my head and other places I'll spare you from describing. (Not sure why; I was pretty open about those bowel things.)

My beard and mustache growth is still way behind. I've exposed a lot of my chin which I tried to hide since 1974 with my beard. Radiation made me look like a cancer patient.

I won't be completely cured until my beard rivals George Clooney's. Then, I presume, I will be fully loved like he is.

 

 

It's been two weeks since I had my last zapping or radiation for my throat cancer.  When I went to the doctor, he looked down my mouth and said, "It's still red in there."

Dr. Dean Davis also explained that radiation continues to work its magic (or destruction) for four days after each treatment. So it's really been just over a week that the healing began.

Funny, after eight weeks of radiation, I'm not healing with the speed of light.

In fact, for the first week my throat was as raw as, literally, an open wound, and every time I swallowed (which as it turns out you do quite a bit during the day), it hurt.

I am still eating through my stomach tube (6 cans of vanilla milkshake Ensure a day).

I mentioned to the doctor that when I burp, I can taste the vanilla.

He was a little surprised at that. Not that I can burp. But that I can taste the vanilla.

Radiation generally wipes out your taste buds. You have five kinds — sweet, sour, bitter, salty and glutamic acid.  The latter one is what makes steaks taste good.

You start out with 10,000 taste buds. By the time you're an older adult, you're left with about 5,000.

After eight weeks of radiation around your tongue, you pretty much don't have any. They have to grow back.

Sweet is one of the last to grow back so that's why the good doctor was surprised when I said I could taste the vanilla.

I don't know if that's a good sign or not. It may be a couple weeks before my throat is well enough to let food pass by without igniting a firestorm in my mouth.

But I will let you know as soon as I do whether some of my favorite foods have any taste at all.

Of course, one of those foods is pizza. But it turns out the dough expands as it goes over the throat and that just might not be a good idea for awhile.

The doctor suggested I start with milk and work my way up to ice cream. I know I won't be having Doritos during the Super Bowl.

My tongue, by the way, still hurts. And this has prevented me from talking a lot. Many see that as a good thing.

I also can't cackle. Before, I could cackle with the best of them. But the newsroom has been eerily silent of my cackling for about four months now. Some have missed that.

The rest of my body is doing reasonably well. My head is relatively clear — not fatigued fuzzy as it has been. This has allowed me to return to work for five to seven hours a day.

I have just begun to wake up as early as 8 a.m. That's an hour or two improvement over recent weeks. My work day used to begin at 6 a.m. but that's still down the road.

I have enough energy to play 18 holes of golf with an electric cart. My game has gone to pot. I haven't broken 80 since September and I've been shooting in the 80s or 90 or 91.

Last Saturday, I had a $3 bet with my alleged buddy, Stuart Sultze. In the previous week, I shot an 86 and he had an 85. Well I shot another 86 but he shot a 72. I felt violated.

I'm going to lay off betting for awhile. I want my throat and my irons to be up to par.

Today (1/17) was my last cancer treatment.

The therapists (Wayne, Jesse, Lorri F., Arlene and Lorri C.) at the Florence Wheeler Cancer Center gave me a silver graduation pin that looks like a flame and says, "Hope."

The sun was out when I left the center and I felt uplifted.

I also felt my very sore throat after 39 radiation treatments to my neck and three chemo treatments to my veins. It was four months I wouldn't wish on anyone.

It will take at least two or three months to return me to the state I was at the end of August when physician's assistant Kevin Nelson felt the side of my neck and said, "Oh, oh."

Before I even knew what I had, I began blogging about my condition in hopes it would demystify the cancer experience.

Well, I demystified it all right — every barf, diarrhea, constipated, nauseated, fatigued, sore throat, dry mouth, blister tongue, mucus mouth, stomach tube, needle poking, can't sleep, can't eat  and raw coughing moments.

Dr. Anthony Ciarolla (chemo) and Dr. Dean Davis (radiation) and their wonderful staffs held my hand and answered all my questions through the ordeal.  My wife, Mary, literally kept me alive with her care.

While I was knocked down more than I've ever been knocked down in my life, I would recover from the treatments enough to write about it.  The one thing was the treatment was working.

Ciarolla got giddy when when he saw how much the meatball-sized tumor shrank with the chemo, and Davis pronounced on my Jan. 3 birthday that his radiation treatments zapped away any sign of the cancer. They don't believe it's ever coming back.

I shared the good and the bad, not really knowing how bad it was going to be. I joked about the misery (in the belief humor allows you to wrap your mind around life's difficulties). And it's worth noting throat cancer is one of the more difficult types of treatments. Other cancers have far less bad side effects.

My extended family and friends — some of whom I had not heard from in years — as well my church and blogging friends offered prayers and support. People I don't even know sent me cards.

One caught me pleasantly by surprise. It was from Dr. Ravi Patel, head of the wonderful Comprehensive Blood and Cancer Center on Truxtun Ave. It was called, "Upbeat Cancer Coverage."

Because it expressed the thoughts of many I've heard from, he said I could reprint it here:

Hello Steve,
 
Thanks for sharing your experiences during treatment with others
This creates a lot of encouragement for patients who are undergoing cancer therapy.
These kinds of stories with all of its humor always bring out the positive side of cancer.
In spite of all that you are going through, your ability to continue writing your articles, is lifting the hearts and minds of many.
Please do not hesitate to call me if I can in any way make your journey through cancer easy. (I am an oncologist in town).
The great work your physicians have done and your attitude is going to cure you.
 Wishing you a very healthy and cancer free New Year and life.
 Ravi Patel.

It illustrates that Bakersfield is a very caring town. It's one of the reasons I've stayed here  nearly 30 years and more than six times longer than any other place I've lived in my life.

I still have a way to go. My throat and mouth are battered and sore. I'll let you know when they get better.

But right now I am better.

I played 18 holes of golf on Sunday (the first since Dec. 2) and plan to play a couple rounds this weekend. I feel that kind of fun and exercise is therapeutic.

The doctors didn't even have to prescribe it.


 

I am reading with great interest the story about the arrest of six Lake Isabella-area men on various charges including being members of the Vagos motorcycle gang.

At least a few of them live in the Happy Haven Trailer Park where one resident describes them as good neighbors.

I don't pretend to know the facts of this case. We'll let the courts sort that out.

But it brings up fond memories of my dealings with two motorcycle clubs — the notorious Hells Angels, including its leader, Ralph "Sonny" Barger, and the Knights Motorcycle Club of Oildale.

The Knights have a 35-year-history in Bakersfield, mostly at its current location near Wright and Norris avenues, but they also had a club for about 10 years around 1990 near Rosedale Highway and Verdugo Lane.

Rumors about the Knights abounded. They were supposed to be a tough, crime-infested gang. But the facts never much supported that.

Oh, it is true. A few of their members got busted for drugs over the years. One of their former presidents, Floyd "Pig" Keys, was in a third trial in 1993 convicted of killing his girlfriend, Debra Ward. He swore his innocence until the end.

But officers of the club once invited me to their Rosedale facility to describe their real purpose — riding American-made motorcycles and partying. They had a nice set up for that.

And today I called another officer, a man who would identify himself only as Brutus, but said he's been a member for 27 years. He said the club's purpose remains the same and in addition the club is one of the sponsors of the Oildale Toy Run, and the club quietly provides turkeys and other presents for needy families at Christmas.

He said any member caught over the years doing anything illegal did so outside the club and on their own.

I have no evidence to counter what Brutus is saying.

But the Hells Angels — that's a different story. One of my most memorable stories I ever covered was the 1973 Oakland murder trial of Sonny Barger and four others for the shooting death, and subsequent house fire that burned the body, of a Cuban drug dealer.

The drug dealer violated the 11th Commandment — thou shalt not give the Hell's Angels bad dope. He tried to make up for it but as he was laying on a couch passed out, Sonny walked up to him, pulled out a strange-looking gun and shot him to death, a former Hells Angel testified.

In one of my stories for the Contra Costa Times a typo appeared that say Sonny "pulled out a strange-looking gut."

Sonny didn't threaten to harm me over the typo. There was something else.

All of the defendants were acquitted. Sonny testified he was making love to his girlfriend, Sharon — who was a beauty queen from Livermore — at the time the drug dealer was killed. To solidify his truthfulness, Sonny testified he sold drugs for a living. (He was, oddly enough, convicted of selling drugs in his very next trial).

During that trial I went to Sonny's house to visit Sharon. I believe I am the only reporter ever to have been inside his house. I wrote a story about it. Sonny, from the jail center,  called my roommate at out Pleasanton apartment and threatened to harm me and ordered me never to talk to Sharon or go to his house again.

I loved covering that murder trial. The defendants all wore $500 suits. To this day, I've never worn a $500 suit. Their girlfriends were flawlessly beautiful. Their friends would make snide remarks about reporters in the elevators. What fun.

Sonny is now in Phoenix. He had throat cancer in 1983 (another thing we have in common) and lost his vocal cords. He operated a motorcycle shop in Phoenix, but it closed when I went to try to visit him a few years ago.

I have never passed a chance to chat with Hells Angels when I see them in a courthouse or out on the road. Generally, they are not very friendly.

Not like the Knights members, including Floyd "Pig" Keys," who have always been friendly and chatty.