February 28, 2021

Now that I have made it through my first week of treatments, and week one of chemo, seemed like a good time for an update. Week one of radiotherapy consisted of 5 days of treatment over at the cancer center, once every day for five days, along with the chemo pill at night times. The ladies over there are super nice and the procedure goes by pretty quickly, like 10 minutes. Takes longer to get there and back than the treatment takes. I've even met a couple of regulars like me out in the waiting room, must be scheduled at the same times. Everyone I've spoke to is pretty nice, for a bunch of guys with cancer!

I had some bad news from Friday, our poor dog has been sick for a few weeks. We took him back to the vet because his insides were swollen. They told us it was water building up around his insides and it wasn't good. It was likely either cancer or congestive heart failure... He's been giving us those eyes for awhile now, letting us know something wasn't right. So after some careful consideration we chose to have him euthanized, one of the hardest decisions of my life honestly. We've had him since he was 7 weeks old and has barely left my wife's side, he was nearly 14 years old. I was at work a fair amount of the time, but also my best friend! He was really a great dog!

February 23, 2021

Man a lot has happened since my last update. After going to bed...quite frankly livid...not sleeping much...and then getting a call from my radiologist in the next morning, I had another seizure while on the phone with him. He said it was most likely stress induced, given all the things that had happened leading up to that point. Thankfully my wife didn't send me to the hospital, she just kept me sitting upright and leading me back home I reckon...it's truly a weird feeling waking up from a seizure. I remember looking at the clock over and over, trying to understand what had happened...words coming back slowly while my wife calmly keeps asking me if I'm ok. The doctor wasn't exactly happy it didn't sound like, he wanted to call an ambulance, but my wife told him there's nothing they can do for him, he will be awake before they get here. He just asked that she keep and eye on my vitals. 

After all that, my treatments were postponed until Monday, and my wife explained...for me since that's the part wear I slipped into the seizure...that I wanted treatments weather the Temozolomide showed up or not. Fortunately, the Temozolomide showed up Monday afternoon, immediately after my treatments. I took one of those Monday night, which brings me to today. I went in for my treatments, and came home to a weird feeling in my stomach, felt like I ate something radioactive...hard to describe really...not really upset, just off...Experienced a range of emotions for a brief little bit, while trying to talk to my wife about the feeling, guess that's kinda part of it. In any case I'm feeling a lot better now!

February 17, 2021

Ok, so today I was supposed to go get some info on my new medication, Temozolomide. Which would have been great except that the medication hasn't been delivered to my address, nor shipped to the pharmacy. Along with that, I got a phone call from the provider at about 30 minutes before my appointment to let me know there would be a +$4,000 copay for that medication. Which is obviously great since I'm supposed to be starting treatments tomorrow at 10:40 am and am supposed to have this medication already. The company also said, hey we can't ship this to you until you pay... I'm like well, you now I've already paid my out of pocket maximum and they said, sorry we can't see that, you have to pay or call this other number who prescribed your medication. Long story short...my wife and I have been on the phone all day and have gotten absolutely no where. Anthem says it takes 45 days to clear...but surprisingly they expect payments in less than 30...gee whiz fellows, how does that work. When I log into Anthem on my phone, it clearly says everything is paid, but Anthem says no it takes 45 days...I've never seen a company that updates my phone app before they update their stuff. 

In any case, we go in tomorrow to see what the medical doctor has to say, and then to find out what radiotherapy has to say. I sure would like to have the radiotherapy guy say sure lets get you started while we wait, but I about grantee that's not going to happen. So here I am, five weeks out from surgery and I still can't get my therapy going. I'm super disappointed in this drug delivery company for waiting until the day before I needed the medication to call me about the copay...super disappointed in my medical doctor for not saying hey by the way this medication is going to be expensive...and super disappointed in his nurses for also not mentioning this situation to me...

February 11, 2021

I started back to work this week. Things have went pretty good so far. I've managed to stay fairly busy and keep things on track given my work from home position. I'm glad that this is working out, I really needed something to do, as sitting around the house was getting super old. I think I've watched all there is on Netflix and working through Prime video pretty quickly, lol. Now with a bit of work to do to stay busy, I think it's going to work out fine.

I'm still waiting on my treatments to start up next week. I'm sure hoping that goes smoothly with nothing more than some fatigue to deal with and a bunch of pills. I'm thinking the radiotherapy will go pretty smoothly just like the Dr. told me, but the chemo I'm a little concerned about. We shall see how it goes, I will check in soon!

February 4, 2021

This week has been a trial by fire at the Dr. office. One meeting after another to get things going. Late last week I had two Dr's appointments, both of which were just introductions and discussions about radiotherapy and another about Temozolomide. These appointments went fine, and as expected. 

This week however, we had two more appointments, one of which was for another MRI up in White county, and another which was preparation for radiotherapy. This was the fun one... In this appointment they had me lay down on a table, and allow them to place a mask on my face. This mask was pretty hot, like about 165 degrees Fahrenheit if I'm not mistaken. This mask is to prevent my face from moving during treatments, this way I'm kept perfectly still. Overall, no problems making the mask, and I'm only planning to wear it for 10 minutes a day. I don't anticipate it being too much of a problem. Still waiting on another appointment with medical doctor to determine blood work and proper Temozolomide before the radiotherapy begins.

Treatments will start up on February 18 at 10:40 am and last five days a week for six weeks. Along with that, I will be taking a low doze of the Temozolomide chemotherapy, pill form, for seven days a week until treatments are over.  Once treatments are over, then I get a week off if I'm not mistaken, then follow up with one week of higher doze of Temozolomide for one week and then off for three weeks. We hold onto that for several months and wait to see what the Dr has to say.

February 4, 2021

So I started down the road to flexible filament the other day. I did finally receive that material and have had it in hand for a few minutes. It is a rather floppy material to say the least, in fact it is quite flexible, hadn't really expected that initially. I was expecting something more flexible that my PLA but this is really something else entirely. My initial thought for using this material is to make a flexible diaphragm for a thermal heat engine, so in that case this will work rather well I do believe.  

This material itself is rather flexible, so we may need to adjust the total thickness to add up to something more or less flexible. The material is flexible enough that bending it is quite easy and can be achieved by hand with no problems. In fact you can barely tell you are flexing the material at all. So again, may need to adjust the total thickness to get what we are after.

The material itself prints readily on my 3D printer, but does suffer some stringing problems on this Bowden tube extruder. I find that printing normal "flat" type extrusions work very well, while stringing materials are not quite so good. With that in mind, I think I can develop a heat engine that will work out readily using these design constraints. One large displacement chamber, coupled with a small active chamber to do the power stroke, and a flywheel to keep everything moving and I think we are getting close to an active engine. Now we just need to test it out...