Okay, here is a HUGE topic summary I spent most of the week writing. I hope it answers all the questions so far!
How did you find out you had cancer?I've advocated in this topic that everyone who can get checked or run tests for cancer do so regularly, such as with breast and testicle examinations, and for the ladies of GW, get Gardasil. Unfortunately, in my case this would have done no good. However, don't let that dissuade you from the regular checkup.
For myself, it's hard to tell when the symptoms started. I was in my final year of school, trying to fix some shitty grades and graduate. I had a problem with a foreign language credit and there was an incomplete, and basically when I started to exhibit signs of a cold, I assumed they were stress related. I have no idea when I first noticed, but according to livejournal I had a severe shoulder pain on March 30th, and never quite recovered, complaining directly of flulike symptoms on April 7th , thinking it was drinking catching up to me.
The first time I knew something was wrong was really wrong was about May 3rd, the last final I had. I'd been feeling like shit the whole week; I kept coughing and I was getting tired a lot, taking naps for the first tie in my life. The night before the final, my roommate was there finishing his project...and I couldn't breath when I lay down. Like, I'd try and I'd struggle the whole time. I didn't sleep the entire night, despite my best efforts. I assumed it was an allergic reaction to miso, a sauce I had just tried yesterday at this rich fancy chinese place, but decided at long last to see a doctor when I could.
Finals finished, I somehow graduated (coughing as I got the degree), and Chef and I planned to go to Florida. The night before he was supposed to show up, I not only was still having breathing problems, but my jaw suddenly exploded in pain in the morning, prompting me to almost call the trip off. But this was my only free break this summer, and we went anyways. The trip could have been better, but I felt sick the whole time. Sleep didn't come at all for the most part and I felt miserable the entire time, so we cut it short and on the train when my hands both locked up in pain, I called my mom and we scheduled a doctor's appointment as soon as I got back. I've apologized to Chef for the shitty trip, but you also have to admit; I've got a hell of an excuse huh.
The doctor couldn't understand the throat swelling and prescribed some steroids. It chills my blood to think if those steroids had worked better; I wouldn't have gone in to further doctors until much, much later. As it was, the swelling didn't get any better, and we went to an ENT who couldn't find anything wrong either. Finally a general practitioner prescribed Tussinex, a hardcore cough suppressant. The night I took Tussinex, my throat inflated pretty bad, so my mom assumed I was allergic to Tussinex and the GP finally said to take me to the emergency room and have an X-ray done, since it was clear nothing was working. I think she suspected something else at that point.
I've described what happened in the emergency room earlier in this topic so I won't restate. Needless to say, the X-ray was followed by a CAT scan, which revealed a large mass over my lung.
So what was all that stuff before?The reason no one could see anything and all the weird symptoms like a swollen throat and my muscles in my shoulder suddenly rising were from the tumor pushing up on my entire body, shifting everything up a little. The jaw lock up was actually from having coughed so much my jaw seized up. Later, before I would start chemo, I also experienced some back pain that is now gone (how much of it was stress and how much was more cancer I don't know) and the throat swelling would increase to the ridiculous proportions you saw in the pictures.
So did you have cancer yet?Not yet, despite what the nurse said. I made the topic on GW hastily, in all honesty. See, CAT scans can't tell you what something is, just that something is there. There was a good chance it could have been displaced pneumonia, scar tissue, mold, and any number of things. But that nurse's confidence had shaken me, and I was pretty certain it was cancer.
In order to find out this kind of shit, doctors use a biopsy. A biopsy is basically taking a large needle and sucking out a bit of the mass. This requires the patient to be kind of drugged up so they don't feel that shit obviously, so I was given a lot of pain killers via an IV. It is here we discovered I have a severe physical reaction to IV needles; namely I start retching and freaking out. Sucks, but this ended up being a constant thing too; I still can't do IV needles. So while I was in the hospital, they admitted me and took the biopsy that next morning. Before the biopsy, I had a weird incident where every muscle in my stomach ended up seizing violently. It was probably from the fear and stress of the situation, but part of me also thinks the tumor...knew...
The biopsy is done while the patient is in a CAT machine usually so they can pinpoint exactly where the mass is. It wasn't very frightening or painful, and I was able to go home soon after, where that stomach thing happened again and I ingested some painkillers. At this point I was very high and made my sister post once in this topic and apparently hallucinated a bit and blathered on about red and yellow and how there was a dog in the corner of the room (later I found a stuffed animal wolf in the corner of that room, so balls to everyone who thought I was crazy).
After the biopsy was the waiting period. I won't bore you with the details and the people confidently saying OH IT WILL BE NOTHING but it's a hard time. Stephen King once said people get two types of scared, TV-scared and real-scared, and waiting for biopsy results is usually TV-scared (the kind where you're scared of shit that happens to people on TV) but as I said, I was pretty certain the news was bad.
Then we went in to the Cancer Center, an outpatient clinic, where I met with my oncologist, a man you hope to only see once, where yes, he confirmed I had cancer...testicular cancer. For some weird reason, I seem to have skipped quite a few steps of testicular cancer and had it a fairly advanced tumor over my lungs. He told me I had about a 50% cure rate, despite the advanced nature of the tumor, which were good odds, and then left, where I had my one of two reactions to this event; I was holding the papers describing the tumor and as soon as he left, I murmured “fuck” and threw them against the wall, at which point my mom collapsed into me and my sister grabbed me in a hug while I swore just a little bit more. Yeah, that's actually about the extent of it. No really big scene.
So...testicular cancer. Explain how that's in the lungUnfortunately, there won't be a good explanation for this. Doktormartini will say it is because I did not eat algae. Here's the educated (or not monstrously stupid) guess though.
When the fetus is created, the gonads start up near the throat, and then proceed to move down. Often times this leaves pieces of tissue behind. Traditionally, testicular cancer moves into three stages. First it appears in the testicle, and is highly curable (95%). If not caught it then moves up into the stomach, also a better cure rate than 50%, and then finally into the lungs, following that fetal line in reverse. However, sometimes one of those pieces of tissue can get cancer. It's rare, but it happens. And it happened to me. Pretty unfair, I know.
What tests do you run after you get cancer?Well, in most cases they want to make sure the cancer is nowhere else. So traditionally most oncologists suggest a follow up CAT scan of the whole body and a bone scan, along with a pulmonary response test. I also had a testicular ultrasound later.
What's a CAT scan?A CAT scan is basically putting the patient into a big ole X-ray machine and viewing the human body as a 3D picture. It uses slices and generates a neat 3d picture where they can see if there are any other masses anywhere else. In the past to do this, you had to ingest an awful barium pill that tasted like gasoline. Now they've replaced it with this flavorless contrast, although you can make it taste like lemonade, where you drink it and wait a bit for it to cycle through the system (about thirty minutes after you drink two bottles). Then they insert an IV (here we confirmed my reaction to IVs unforunately) and insert additional contrast which makes you feel like you've just crapped yourself (this is a natural reaction) and they lie you on a bed where you get rolled into a big donut, get told to breath a bit, and then they move you in and out. It's all relatively painless, except for that IV part. Here's a youtube video showing you what the CAT scan looks like:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PlOr_8lyJtc It takes some time for them to check all those slices, about two or three days.
What's a bone scan?See, cancer likes to spread. Sometimes it gets in the bone, which is a huge pain in the ass for everyone. In order to check if it's there, doctors run a bone scan. Through an IV they inject a radioactive isotope that takes a few hours to go through the body. This isotope bonds to hot areas of the bone. Some areas are always hot, like the spine, but if irregularities show up in the scan, it means you've got cancer in that bone area. The bone scan itself is also relatively painless, but is kind of scary and boring at the same time. You lie down, your legs are tied together so they don't move, and you're more or less locked in to this slab. Then a big metal plate comes down really really close to your face and you wait twenty minutes while it slooooowly goes down the front of your body, scanning. If you happen to jiggle, the whole thing starts up again. Mine was kind of scary because apparently I moved my head and they rescanned it, and the entire time I'm thinking OH GOD ITS IN MY SKULL.
What's a pulmonary response test?Because chemo is poison and because of all the stress and shit, they want to make sure your lungs can take it. My test wasn't that great, considering the mass is over my lung and I wasn't in the best of health anyways, but I passed. Some of you may have done this; it's basically a bunch of breathing exercises where you blow into a tube as hard as you can and then inhale and it's just really a pain in the ass. Not actually painful, just irritating because you don't have any air left but KEEP BLOWING KEEP BLOWING. Funny anecdote, Lance Armstrong (who had the same cancer I do, although much further progressed and with a much worse prognosis) was approached with this test back when it was just a ball in a tube (this is the version some of you may have done). Angered, he grabbed it, blew hard enough to knock the ball out of the tube, and said “get that fucking thing away from me”. Of course, I am no professional biker so I didn't get to be HEH BADASS.
What's a testicular ultrasound?Basically, it's a way to check if there are lumps or growths in your testicles with soundwaves, just like when you or your partner is pregnant. In a horrific turn of events, yup, the ultrasound technician was
alarmingly hot. Luckily, being scared of cancer means we didn't get a weird Judd Apatow moment so no DOING story. Basically, she left the room, I shucked my pants, put a towel over my legs, lifted my dick up and lie it flat on my stomach and cover it with a rag, then lay back down. She came in, rubbed some cool gel stuff on my testicles, and used a thing that looked like a book scanner on it. Once again, painless if kind of uncomfortable (I did not make small talk and she mercifully did not try).
How did your tests go?Great. There was no cancer in my bone or anywhere else in my body, outside of the one tumor and a few nodes near it. Even the testicular ultrasound was completely clear. Like I said, my cancer is a bizarre little fuck.
Did you do anything else before treatment and these tests?Yes. We tried to freeze sperm, because chemotherapy tends to make people sterile for life. This is such a weird freudian experience. First we had to schedule the appointment, which is surprisingly hard to do and awkward because your mom has all your medical info but you really really don't want her around when they ask the last time you've been sexually active (embarassingly long). But basically you don't jerk off until your appointment, and they leave you in a room with a lounge chair with a doily on it, a cup, a bunch of Penthouse and Playboys on the floor, and a TV with a headset looping some incredibly generic porn. You do your business in the cup, a surprisingly awkward arrangement because lord knows you don't want to GET ANY ON THE EDGE and then hand it to the technician.
But you'll notice I said try. See, freezing sperm, aside from being really expensive (about 150 dollars a year), requires that you not have, say, hepatitis B, or your sample might corrupt others. Which means a blood test. One I just could not do. I panicked, and we left. So my sperm will be destroyed sometime soon and I'll probably be sterile, all because I couldn't take an injection. There's definitely some lesson in the fact that I could fulfill the manly part of the duty but not the blood work, but who knows what it is. This was the first failure I'd experience, but later that night my mom told me that she didn't care about the genetic material and that there were unwanted kids all over the world. Adoption was something she always was for. Later I also read Lance Armstrong's book and was horrified at the part about the in vitro fertilization; his wife had like YEARS of injections that were horrible and painful just to get that sperm in there. So fuck it, I thought it was just TURKEY BASTER HERE YOU GO. So I won't have any of my own kids probably, no big deal.
So what did you do after the tests?We sat down with the doctor and discussed treatment options. There are three types of ways to cure cancer (doktormartini's invisible fruit energies not withstanding, and newer techniques being ignored).
Radiation therapyThis is one we haven't discussed, namely because it's the least effective on this type and would be pallilative and not curative (meaning a type of therapy to reduce, but not kill, the cancer). So to reiterate:
there is no radiation treatment going on with me. At least two people have thought as much, and no, chemotherapy is NOT radiation.
As a result, I know little about it, but I understand it's basically dosing the area of the tumor with hardcore rays and burning the little cocksucker where it sits.
SurgerySurgery is exactly what it sounds like; a dude goes in with a scalpel and cuts the cocksucker out. We decided to go with chemo first, and then whatever is left over, we go in with a scalpel. Surgery is always kind of risky, but also self-explanatory so I won't say more on it. We don't know how necessary it will be but the chemo+surgery was what gave the 50% cure rate number, I should mention. In an ideal world though, the chemo will kill it alone. Traditionally with testicular cancer, a testicle has to be removed. Not having cancer in my testicles, this isn't something I have to worry about!
ChemotherapyThis is the one we decided. I'd be on a fairly aggressive course of chemotherapy called BEC (more on this later). This would be four sessions, or most of the summer since each session would be about three weeks. None of them would require me to go to the hospital; the world has changed and I would go to an outpatient clinic where the chemo would be administered and then go home. There were just two problems. The first was the clinic would be closed for a week because of some unrelated reason. The second was my crippling fear of IVs would make these treatments unbearable for everyone involved. So we decided two birds with one stone; while the clinic was closed, I would go in for a portocath surgery at the hospital; Tuesday early morning.
Chemotherapy itself is the act of injecting the body with various poisons that kill all the fast acting cells in the body. This includes cancer cells, which react badly to chemo and die off. It also includes hair cells and white blood cells unfortunately, and often includes lots of side effects. More on chemo later with BEC, but it's basically a lot of IV bags!
What's a portocath?A portocath is basically a catheter placed under the skin on the chest. It basically looks like a round bubble attached to a needle that goes into a vein. They place that bubble and needle under the skin and glue it shut. Rather than stick someone in the arm constantly, nurses can just place a small needle that barely hurts into that bubble (and you can get some cream that numbs the area anyways) and they can attach whatever they need. I'll post a pic later.
My surgery was okay. They gave me a lot of drugs. The scariest part was his casual mentioning OH YEAH THIS MIGHT COLLAPSE YOUR LUNG LOL but that rarely happens. Portocaths can get infected, but that's with time and hopefully we don't have that problem. Basically they shaved my right side and stuck that cocksucker in! It looks kind of gross, because there is this GILL in my chest, but its preferable to being IVed every time.
Wait, you were in the hospital for chemo though!You are correct. The tumor grew, and my neck swole up, and my aunt who is a doctor saw it and said “put him in the hospital and start him on chemo now”. As posted earlier in the thread, my throat had swollen to a ridiculous degree and we started the chemo the week early. This meant admission to the hospital because the clinic was closed. So we rolled into the hospital on Tuesday, and the first five day chemo started. Pictures were posted earlier, but here's a repost of just how badly swollen my neck got before chemo:
I wish I could say the hospital visit was a blur, but that implies I felt nothing. It was a scary time. My mom stayed on the recliner next to me (the cot they brought for her was uncomfortable) the whole week. Every two or so hours a nurse would come and check my blood pressure, temperature, oxygen, the works. They switched out at night, and would erase their names on the dry erase board. I sat there, used my laptop, and tried to read, but the various emetics and painkillers made focus difficult.
Also, everyone in the world knows airline food is awful.
It is NOTHING compared to hospital food. I swear, hospital food is the worst fucking shit on the planet. How do you fuck up a turkey sandwich? HOW. The chemo also started to affect my taste buds a little, but it was still awful, to the degree I eventually refused to eat it (the only edible food being a “cheese pizza”, which was nothing more than one of those Red Baron pizza singles which tasted oddly good to my changing taste buds). I had my mom and her friends bring in outside food several instead, which was much better; Quiznos and japanese takeout and shit like that.
But the painkillers and the chemo took their effect; I couldn't make it to the bathroom several times, and had a pissjug that I had to use frequently. One of the big fears in chemo is you want to make sure your kidneys are dialysing, so I had to ask people to leave the room frequently while I pissed in a jug. You can see this piss jug in this picture, on the sink next to the blue stuff:
You'll also notice the discolored arm. I woke up on Thursday only to realize that my arms were swollen and I couldn't bend them and my right arm was suddenly discolored. It turned out just lying bed had fucked up my systems a little and I should elevate my arms (thus the pose in the picture with my arm resting on the IV machine). I should have probably walked around but I was afraid of some horrible IV accident, so I stayed in bed for the most part.
On Friday, the day before I had to leave, I decided to “take a shower”. Because they were administering fluids, I would take one with the IV machine. They put a big orange bag over my shoulder with the portocath, and I looked in the mirror and I couldn't take it. Just this dripping machine and this biohazard bag. I took a terrible semi sponge bath and waited till Saturday, release day.
Mom's friends came by to visit, but I explicitly told my own friends not to, since I didn't want them to see me in this state. It was a boring but scary time, if that makes sense, and I didn't want them to see me all pathetic in bed just lying there acting okay and a little drugged up. Saturday rolled around, the final bag of liquids went in, and I went home, with instructions that I should drink lots of fluids and piss a lot.
This all had the side effect of my being incredibly bloated, to the extent I could barely waddle from my room back to my mom's bedroom, which had been sterilized and is now where I sleep (she sleeps in mine, and it took a solid week to teach her that the laptop could be closed and you can press a button on the harddrive, you do not need to unplug EVERYTHING FROM EVERYTHING). The sad effect of this is the hospital stay and chemo actually ended up making me feel worse than any part of the cancer did, and I basically was looking at dark times.
So what's a chemo anyways?Okay, basically as I said, chemotherapy kills all the fast acting cells in the body. The chemotherapy regime I'm on is called BEC, or bliomycin, etoposide, and cisplatin, the three chemo drugs in the IV. Blio and etopo don't require any liquids, and can be done in thirty minutes. Cisplatin, however, is a week long drug that also requires lots of liquids, since a major risk of it is kidney damage. Here are the sideeffects of these drugs, and what I've experienced (italicized).
Cisplatin-Kidney damage (hopefully won't!)
-Decreased blood levels of magnesium, potasium, and calcium (this is all put in the liquids to prevent this)
-
Nausea (so far mild)
-Vomiting
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Taste changes, including metallic taste of food (this one comes and goes, but when it comes, it's a doozy. I usually snack on candy, chocolate, or mints, something that really sticks in the mouth, when it does, and it passes)
-
Sensation of pins and needles in hands or feet (I've got this right now, but the doctor thinks it's a pinched nerve in my shoulder and not chemo, and I agree since neuropathy never settles like this or this quickly and it's only in two fingers)
Bleomycinn-Fever and chills
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Nausea-Loss of appetite (not really!)
-
Hair loss (my beard has also stopped growing and is actually falling out. My chest hair remains intact, and my pubes are slowly falling out. We shaved my head, which was hard for my mom, but currently none of it falling out. I anticipate the rest will later though)
-Sores in mouth or on lips (I have to be really careful with these; if a sore gets infected, my lowered white blood cells can't fight it as well. So I have a salt rinse I use before I go to sleep)
-
Skin changes, like small rashes (I have a small patch of red dots going up my right shoulder, near the portocath)
Etoposide-
Decreased white blood cell count (I get an injection to fight this, but more on that later)
-Decreased platelet count
-Mild nausea (let's just skip the ones I've got already)
-Mild vomiting
-Loss of appetite
-Changes in taste of food
-Hair loss
The etoposide gets administered with the cisplatin, and the bleo is done on Tuesday, so each cycle looks like the following:
Week 1: MTWThF- Cisplatin, from 8:30 to 2:30 at the earliest.
T- Bleomycinn and Etoposide, sometime during the Cisplatin
Week 2: T- Bleomycinn, from 9:30 to about 11:00
Week 3: T- Bleomycinn, from 9:30 to about 11:00
And we have four cycles of this. The next cycle starts tomorrow (or today, depending when I finish this).
What's this Knee Day?This is pretty much the last question I think I have to address. There's a reason I left it for so long.
I am confident that short of the death of my child or something equally worse, I will never feel pain or fear like I did on Knee Day. The day after Knee Day, I cried and screamed because I was afraid if I moved, it would come back. There is NOTHING like Knee Day. I will try to describe it, but I pray no one who reads this ever feels like this.
Look up at that schedule. On Week 2 of the cycle, every Monday, I go in for an injection of Blunesta, a white blood cell encouraging shot. It unfortunately is a normal injection, administered behind the arm, rather slowly over about a minute. The first time I took it pretty well, no retching, and it was done, and I was happy. After all, this would boost my white blood cells! That's a good thing!
Later that week, I sat down to play GTA IV when my right knee started to feel a little bad. Just like, a little pain. No problem; earlier on before chemo, my knees had both suddenly swollen up from inactivity, and one of my mom's friends, god bless her, brought over two knee compressors from Kerr Drug and just like that those two black compressors got rid of the pain. So I called my mom and told her to bring the compressors.
Except they didn't work. They didn't feel WORSE by any means, but they didn't WORK. Why weren't they working? I decided to lie down but the pain got even worse. My mom got the ice pack, but that wasn't doing anything.
See, what no one had told me was that Blunesta has a rare side effect of causing massive, horrible, joint pain for some people. So my mom called a friend of hers who had ovarian cancer and she came and massaged the leg which felt better but still hurt.
And this went on
the whole day. Every person who came over that day massaged my knee, and it still hurt and got worse and worse.
How to describe the pain; first imagine really bad joint pain to begin with in your knee. Like something decided to bite your knee from the inside. Then imagine it surges up every 10 seconds. No exaggeration, it just gets worse every ten seconds. And then I want you to imagine it gets worse every hour. Suddenly the pain scales up and you're like “no bring it back to before, please god”. And- here's the part that sucks- nothing is making it better. You put a heating pad on it. Nope. Wrap a bag of peas. Nothing. Switch the two off. Nothing. Mom calls the on call doctor, who, bored or negligent, says it's just part of the chemo pain, give him some Advil. She calls again about six hours later, because all I can say anymore is “No God, there is no God”. Give him some more Advil. Yeah, a hydrocodone, why not. The pills don't work. The words people say go from comfort to mockery. Oh, children do chemo, they can live with this. I swear to you if there is a child in the world who felt the pain I felt on Knee Day they would have
gone mad. No one could help.
Then Sredni's brother came over, rubbed my knee harder than any of my mom's friends (all women) could and miraculously, at about 9 pm, the pain...was gone. I hobbled over to my laptop to thank him...
When my left knee started to tingle.
That's right. The rest of the night, the knees switched. My mom and I got no sleep, I from my constant crying in pain, her from rubbing my knees, trying to beg me to calm down, this is all normal! At this point, I knew it was not normal. This wasn't chemo. I was in too much pain, old people and kids did chemo, there was NO WAY this was chemo pain. I begged her to call the on-call doctor again where guess what, MORE ADVIL. My heart started to beat irregularly, and the pain didn't get better. Finally, at five in the morning, I grabbed her and threatened to call 911 myself; I needed to see a real doctor in the hospital. She was furious at me, and why not? This was just good ole chemo pain wasn't it? Why was her son like this!!! She called up Sredni's dad, who drove us to the hospital emergency room. At this point the pain was so bad I could only cry and she had to answer the admitting nurse's questions for the most part. Finally after a torturous fifteen or so minutes, I was admitted to the hospital again.
At the hospital, it was quickly determined that no, this wasn't normal, they gave me some morphine via an IV (the nurse MISSED THE PORTOCATH THREE TIMES btw and poked me and I retched again) and at last, long last, my knees stopped screaming. It was determined that Blunesta was the cause, not chemo. My mom has since apologized for her doubting and I think she still feels awful for it. I don't blame her though; I blame that awful fucking on call doctor and all her friends for saying it was normal pain.
Unfortunately, the other option to Blunesta is a hospital admittance with almost zero visitors during the weeks of long chemo, so I have to live with the knee pain. It did come back one day, but this time the on-call doctor, a better one, suggested that she give me three of the morphine painkillers prescribed for this, and it worked wonders. So while I will always live in fear of Knee Days, they can be controlled now. But that Knee Day/Night...I will never forget. It was the worst time of my life.
Anyways, I hope that answered all your questions!
Wait...how are you? Really?This is a question I've been getting a lot. I said I had two reactions so far to the news. One was throwing the papers, and the other was when I got home, I grabbed my childhood bear, cried for about twenty seconds, and then never did again and went downstairs and had to slap my mom because she was having a severe panic attack and couldn't breath. HOORAY. But that's been it. My mentality has been mostly irritated; if this doesn't go away, I'm sure terror will factor higher but as it is, I've been bored. Oh sure, there are scary moments; right now I'm kind of worried that this tingling ISN'T a pinched nerve and is instead neuropathy, which is much more serious. And bleomycinn tends to fuck up people's lungs, and that scares me. I'm also way out of shape which means I don't feel good just in general. But for the most part I'm SO BORED. I play games, watch DVDs, post on GW. That's my life. You guys might think WOW...GAMER PARADISE, but I love doing shit, and for the most part I can't. I miss going out to concerts or to do shit, but with a lowered immune system, I have to be careful around crowds. I've also lost my privacy since Mom's taken off work for the most part until this is over (no I don't know how she's pulling it off, but my aunt is coming from India in about three days, which means hopefully my mom can go to work at least part time) and for a while there had a good chance of winning the Breakfast Club unintentionally. Basically, I lost this summer, and then after all this, assuming we get rid of it, I get a whole year of being terrified of remission. My law school dreams got pushed back a year, but hey, maybe cancer will get me a scholarship! SILVER LINING.
Basically, yeah, I have been dealing with this well I guess. Really, people who AREN'T are the ones that make me sad; my uncle loved my dad more than any man, and it destroyed him when he died of cancer, so seeing me, I can tell he's falling apart a little which hurts to see. Little cards and things have also been TOUCHING MY GUPPLES STRONGLY, as have even the small GW YOU'LL MAKE IT STEEL shit.
But I'm not scared, I haven't been depressed. I'm just kind of mad I lost a whole summer!
Okay, so that's the megapost. I'll post a few more pictures of the outpatient clinic I'm having this stuff done at when I can, but if there's anything I forgot to address, feel free to ask!
