Oh my god... Just your mentioning barium made me heave a little. I didn't even realize it had that much of an effect on me, although I did notice at my last CT that it had gotten a lot harder to choke down.
I kept a blog (my slashdot username at deadjournal, if you're interested - complete with hair-falling-out pics) because my family was so far away and it was an easy way to keep them updated. But yeah, typing is harder than I expected when you're wiped from chemo. Playing video games is much easier. I was also on a hodgkin's yahoo group - if any new cancer patients are reading this, I highly recommend this kind of thing. Online support groups meet whenever you have a question, unlike real-life ones!
3. If you are doing what you love and are good at, especially if you are self employed, then RTFA. It is good advice. 4. If you hate your job, or are just one of many little cogs in the great corporate machine, GO DO SOMETHING ELSE.
I think that this is the whole point that so many people are missing. I kept working/going to school during chemo because I loved what I did, and not doing it would depress me enough to interfere with my treatment. If I were some corporate drone with a job I hated, then I probably would have taken it as a sign to get out - but luckily, I've worked hard since high school to make sure I'm never in that position. I know what kind of impact I want to have on the world, I know how I want to get there, and I love everything about it. So cancer had no effect on my career plans whatsoever - although it did cause me to make one decision in my personal life that I would not have made otherwise, that did slightly affect my career. But only slightly.
Some people do need to keep working through treatments, and working a sucky job during treatment would just make a bad situation worse.
If you don't love what you're doing, don't wait for cancer to get out of it. Just like people are saying that you should comment your code whether you're dying or not - you should actively pursue a career that you would MISS if you had to give it up for chemo, whether or not that chemo is imminent.
Gee, what about not strictly speaking? Are these cancers curable then?
Well, yes. I think his point is that there are cancers that are not considered to be curable, as in the vast majority of patients are not cured - but even most of these do have a cure rate of 5-10%. So even if it's "not curable" it actually is occasionally curable. Just not usually curable. I'm not sure there is any cancer with a 0% cure rate, but it might exist.
Hey, I'm a fellow Hodgkin's survivor.:) Hodgkin's is definitely "the cancer to get".
I'm glad to see another survivor that didn't give up work for treatments. I couldn't have, I would have been horrifically depressed if I had. I was in grad school, and I LOVED what I was studying. Quitting would have just added insult to injury for me. Not to mention losing my insurance, which would have been very, very bad. Even with insurance, I'm still negotiating the $20K left on my oncologist's bill. But mainly because I'm not the kind of person who can just sit on their butt all day every day for six months, thinking about how sick I am.
It's actually common these days to gain weight on chemo; most other HD patients I know have. I gained 20 lbs (I hadn't lost any weight beforehand - stage 4A), and am still working my butt off over a year later to lose the last 10. That shit really screwed with my metabolism.
Gotta agree on the port-a-cath. Mine was under the skin, so they still needed a needle, but I couldn't even feel it go in. My first treatment was via IV in my arm - incredibly painful, took 8 hours. With the port, couldn't feel a thing, out of there in under 4 hours. I know some stick out of the skin, but those seem like a pain with having to keep them clean and all. The saline never actually made me vomit, but at my CT scan a couple months ago, when they put in the IV for the dye and ran saline into it, it definitely brought back some old familiar (unpleasant) feelings. Ugh. I didn't get my port taken out for a few months after treatment (just in case), and when I went in to get it flushed with whatever it is they put in to keep it from clotting - THAT nearly made me sick every time.
You get diagnosed with cancer and then you freakin' forget ANYTHING about work. Period. I don't frickin' care if you are the president or Sheryl Crow. You take care of yourself and your family. Managing your work is just below the bottom of any priority or list you may have.
Unless, like the author says, your cancer is treatable and you know most likely won't be dying anytime soon. I continued in grad school (both classes and a research assistantship) full-time while I was getting chemo and radiation. My family wanted me to move back with them (1000 miles away), but I knew that would be completely stupid in my case. I only had about a 20% (or less) chance of dying, but if I'd quit school and done that I would have had a 100% chance of severe depression, which is shown to reduce surivial rates. Not to mention losing my insurance, which would mean that once I was done with treatment I'd probably have to declare bankruptcy, and boy would THAT make the next few years of my life more fun.
Over all, there was no way in hell I was going to let cancer dictate my life. Now, if the initial treatment hadn't worked, and my chances got significantly lower, needed a bone marrow transplant, etc - then I would have pretty much had to quit, and would have gone back to be with my family. But that didn't happen, and my family eventually realized I'd made the right decision.
Dying of cancer and having cancer are two very different situations, and have to be dealt with very differently. It's also the kind of thing that's totally different for different people - I was able to take 3 classes and work 10-20 hours a week during chemo, some people on the same regimen aren't able to. I liked what I was doing a lot; others who don't like their job may see it as more of a nuisance during treatment, or may not have supervisors as understanding and flexible as mine.
I don't know what your current situation is, but I hope that your treatment is going well. And I hope that you're only letting cancer tell you what to do when you absolutely have to.
Yeah, but the article isn't aimed at people who are actively dying. It's aimed at people who probably aren't going to die, but do have a better chance than the average person under 50 years old.
Several commenters are saying how, if they were dying of cancer, they'd ignore all this stuff and spend time with their family etc etc etc.
Of course you would. If you were currently dying of cancer. He says very clearly that if your case is terminal, that's what you should do. The article isn't for those people
It's for people with either curable cancer, or cancer that is long-term treatable (will likely kill you in the next decade, but you'll be fine for at least a few more years). People in those situations can't afford to quit work entirely (not with those Dr bills, trust me!), and in all likelyhood shouldn't give up their normal lives. But it does mean that they have a better-than-average chance of dying, and should probably take a few precautions just in case.
Yes, if you hate your job, hopefully something like that would be a wake-up call to change your situation. But if you're fine with your job, and are most likely not dying anytime soon, quitting is not necessarily the obvious solution.
Right. Notice that for terminal cases, he says "read the next paragraph (regarding learning about new treatments online) and go spend time with your family." The rest of the article was for those people whose cancer is curable, or long-term treatable (as in, you will probably die in the next decade, but will be okay to work for at least a couple more years before things get bad). People in those cases can't/shouldn't give up their normal life because it's not over yet.
- Encourage sharing of documents via a corperate file server, instead of email. Rather than emailing the file, the person should email the location of the file. As a side bonus this helps with versioning etc.
Ugh. This was SUCH a problem at my last job, it drove me crazy. I was a graduate research assistant in an educational reasearch lab, and by far the person on my project most knowledgeable about computers (when I wrote a VB macro to do a slow, time-consuming, repetitive task for us, you should have seen the awe it inspired).
We HAD a server to store things on, we HAD a nice little organizational system in which to store things for our project. Every file WAS, in fact, stored here - but every time someone changed something, they felt the need to email the file to everyone else in the group as well as saying "and it's on the G drive." And when I questioned this, people said they wanted to make sure we had a backup in case the G drive went down. Which is fine - but that is not the right way to back things up. We don't need *ten* copies in everyone's email boxes. But when I suggested to the project manager that I could set up a more efficient backup system, her eyes just kinda glazed over in that "Don't talk computers to me" way. So I remained the only person that would email about a file and just send the location rather than the file itself. *sigh* And people were always wondering why they were reaching their quotas!
Wow, thanks for making me giggle. A whole lot. And then read it again so I can giggle some more. Even if you're not a 35-year-old businessman in a suit and tie sitting in a corner office, that is what I have pictured you as for purposes of reading your comment over and over and continuing to giggle.
Uh, dude? I think you're preaching to the choir there. Call me crazy, but I think I noted a hint of sarcasm in the parent.
Because, see, I think the point was that if the administration *were* in the pocket of big business, then they wouldn't be conducting this investigation.
But don't let me get in the way of what is obviously a well-rehearsed rant.
Whatever, they don't have to bribe the DJs. They just talk to one guy at Clear Channel, and suddenly hundreds (thousands?) of DJs across the country are told they must play this single once every three hours.
It's not all that hard for indie artists to get on iTunes. The reason some established acts aren't on there is entirely their own (or their label's) decision.
I agree that the labels do serve a purpose - but maybe the whole point is that it's time to find other means to that end. If radio stations weren't 90% owned by one of a couple huge corporations, I bet it'd be easier for indies to get airplay. The whole system needs a reboot. Maybe between online music downloads, podcasts, and satellite radio (I know, they're owned too, but the individual stations seem to have MUCH more freedom than, say, a Clear Channel station), that can happen.
I've been curious why it costs more to buy an entire album via download, than it does to buy the cd...
It does? Most albums on iTunes cost $9.99. CDs cost around $15 on average, sometimes as much as $20 for a single disc. Older ones do cost less, and stores often put them on sale for $10-12. But there's still no way I'd say the average price of a new CD is less than $10. I'm not saying online music isn't overpriced - more that CDs are MORE overpriced, and I'm amazed this lawsuit was never brought in regards to them.
One of my clearest memories of my grandmother's death is my grandfather sitting next to me at the funeral, sobbing so hard that his whole body was shaking.
Why do parents cry when their child graduates high school or college? Aren't they happy their loved one will finally become a useful, productive member of society?
Of course they are, but they're also sad that the child is moving away from them. Most people crying at funerals aren't nearly as sad for the person as they are for themselves, having lost the person.
Unfortunately, Borders uses Amazon for their online sales.
However, having worked for Borders, I definitely see them as overall un-evil. I never felt like I was trying to "sell" things, just helping the customers. Unlike another bookstore I could mention (*cough*Booksamillion) - worked there for exactly one day, couldn't take their "YOU MUST SELL DISCOUNT CARDS!" attitude.
Well, or if you've dragged them around to the other stores in the super-strip-mall (Bed Bath & Beyond, Old Navy, etc) and want to reward them for good behavior just by letting them *go* to the toystore, even with no buying involved.
How well I remember surviving endless clothes-shopping in a regular (non-strip) mall, on the promise that I'd get to go to K*B afterwards.
That would be the main reason I'd see parents bringing their kids in.
If you read the article, they actually do mention one antibiotic that dropped out of use due to the liver damage it caused that has been brought back out recently to fight some of these infections.
However, as someone who's been there (not with antibiotics), using medicines that can cause worse problems than the original disease (but at least kill you more slowly) sucks overall. I am all in favor of any attempts to permanently replace these with something safer.
I'm not really trying to single this post out, I've seen a lot of it in this thread. So much emphasis on building things.
Some kids are going to like that, and some aren't. I never did. Had no interest whatsoever. I also knew from a fairly young age that I wanted to be a scientist, NOT an engineer. Before I really had a good idea what an engineer did, I had the vague idea that it wasn't for me, even though it's kind of the "cool" thing for a nerdy science/math-oriented kid to want to be when they grow up. Once I found out what they did, I KNEW it was not for me. (And then I went to MIT, and had to endure years of "Oh, so you're gonna be an engineer?" every time I told someone where I was attending college...)
Out of the things listed here, I would have been interested in approximately zero of them, even though I was very into science, math, and computers.
Not that I have many better suggestions off the top of my head, but just a note that not all kids who are destined to be techies are going to want to build things, so don't put all your eggs in that basket.
And of course, you don't want them to get too far ahead in any one area, since a kid who's terribly advanced in math, but behind in social skills, will have a rough time in school.
I'm sorry, but this is a horrible attitude. No, you don't want your kid to get *behind* in anything, but that doesn't have to come at the expense of something that they're ready and excited to get ahead in. There's no reason to hold your kid back if they're really ready to zoom ahead - being ahead in one subject (or all of them!) is NOT an automatic recipe for social failure and depression, despite what popular media would have you believe. Of course, your kid might start to prefer older friends to their age peers, but is that really so bad?
Because some of us have spouses who would force us to buy the crappy cheap hardware if they had the choice? I mean, my husband still has a computer that can't handle higher than redhat 6.5; if it weren't for the fact that 6.5 has some security holes and he can't use it for much more than IM and low-level web surfing he wouldn't let me replace it at all. We finally negotiated a used G3 iBook, though we have yet to buy it. If we could get a crappy but brand-new laptop for the same price and dual-boot OS X and Linux on it, no way would he let me have the iBook.
Yes, because people with major illnesses must spend every moment dealing with their illness. They have no time at all to kick back and relax and feel normal now and then.
So.... You're worried about the toxoplasmosis from a cat, but the possibility of getting salmonella from a reptile (or even a rodent) doesn't phase you?
Slashdot Mirror
I kept a blog (my slashdot username at deadjournal, if you're interested - complete with hair-falling-out pics) because my family was so far away and it was an easy way to keep them updated. But yeah, typing is harder than I expected when you're wiped from chemo. Playing video games is much easier. I was also on a hodgkin's yahoo group - if any new cancer patients are reading this, I highly recommend this kind of thing. Online support groups meet whenever you have a question, unlike real-life ones!
I think that this is the whole point that so many people are missing. I kept working/going to school during chemo because I loved what I did, and not doing it would depress me enough to interfere with my treatment. If I were some corporate drone with a job I hated, then I probably would have taken it as a sign to get out - but luckily, I've worked hard since high school to make sure I'm never in that position. I know what kind of impact I want to have on the world, I know how I want to get there, and I love everything about it. So cancer had no effect on my career plans whatsoever - although it did cause me to make one decision in my personal life that I would not have made otherwise, that did slightly affect my career. But only slightly.
Some people do need to keep working through treatments, and working a sucky job during treatment would just make a bad situation worse.
If you don't love what you're doing, don't wait for cancer to get out of it. Just like people are saying that you should comment your code whether you're dying or not - you should actively pursue a career that you would MISS if you had to give it up for chemo, whether or not that chemo is imminent.
Well, yes. I think his point is that there are cancers that are not considered to be curable, as in the vast majority of patients are not cured - but even most of these do have a cure rate of 5-10%. So even if it's "not curable" it actually is occasionally curable. Just not usually curable. I'm not sure there is any cancer with a 0% cure rate, but it might exist.
I'm glad to see another survivor that didn't give up work for treatments. I couldn't have, I would have been horrifically depressed if I had. I was in grad school, and I LOVED what I was studying. Quitting would have just added insult to injury for me. Not to mention losing my insurance, which would have been very, very bad. Even with insurance, I'm still negotiating the $20K left on my oncologist's bill. But mainly because I'm not the kind of person who can just sit on their butt all day every day for six months, thinking about how sick I am.
It's actually common these days to gain weight on chemo; most other HD patients I know have. I gained 20 lbs (I hadn't lost any weight beforehand - stage 4A), and am still working my butt off over a year later to lose the last 10. That shit really screwed with my metabolism.
Gotta agree on the port-a-cath. Mine was under the skin, so they still needed a needle, but I couldn't even feel it go in. My first treatment was via IV in my arm - incredibly painful, took 8 hours. With the port, couldn't feel a thing, out of there in under 4 hours. I know some stick out of the skin, but those seem like a pain with having to keep them clean and all. The saline never actually made me vomit, but at my CT scan a couple months ago, when they put in the IV for the dye and ran saline into it, it definitely brought back some old familiar (unpleasant) feelings. Ugh. I didn't get my port taken out for a few months after treatment (just in case), and when I went in to get it flushed with whatever it is they put in to keep it from clotting - THAT nearly made me sick every time.
Unless, like the author says, your cancer is treatable and you know most likely won't be dying anytime soon. I continued in grad school (both classes and a research assistantship) full-time while I was getting chemo and radiation. My family wanted me to move back with them (1000 miles away), but I knew that would be completely stupid in my case. I only had about a 20% (or less) chance of dying, but if I'd quit school and done that I would have had a 100% chance of severe depression, which is shown to reduce surivial rates. Not to mention losing my insurance, which would mean that once I was done with treatment I'd probably have to declare bankruptcy, and boy would THAT make the next few years of my life more fun.
Over all, there was no way in hell I was going to let cancer dictate my life. Now, if the initial treatment hadn't worked, and my chances got significantly lower, needed a bone marrow transplant, etc - then I would have pretty much had to quit, and would have gone back to be with my family. But that didn't happen, and my family eventually realized I'd made the right decision.
Dying of cancer and having cancer are two very different situations, and have to be dealt with very differently. It's also the kind of thing that's totally different for different people - I was able to take 3 classes and work 10-20 hours a week during chemo, some people on the same regimen aren't able to. I liked what I was doing a lot; others who don't like their job may see it as more of a nuisance during treatment, or may not have supervisors as understanding and flexible as mine.
I don't know what your current situation is, but I hope that your treatment is going well. And I hope that you're only letting cancer tell you what to do when you absolutely have to.
Yeah, but the article isn't aimed at people who are actively dying. It's aimed at people who probably aren't going to die, but do have a better chance than the average person under 50 years old.
Of course you would. If you were currently dying of cancer. He says very clearly that if your case is terminal, that's what you should do. The article isn't for those people
It's for people with either curable cancer, or cancer that is long-term treatable (will likely kill you in the next decade, but you'll be fine for at least a few more years). People in those situations can't afford to quit work entirely (not with those Dr bills, trust me!), and in all likelyhood shouldn't give up their normal lives. But it does mean that they have a better-than-average chance of dying, and should probably take a few precautions just in case.
Yes, if you hate your job, hopefully something like that would be a wake-up call to change your situation. But if you're fine with your job, and are most likely not dying anytime soon, quitting is not necessarily the obvious solution.
Right. Notice that for terminal cases, he says "read the next paragraph (regarding learning about new treatments online) and go spend time with your family." The rest of the article was for those people whose cancer is curable, or long-term treatable (as in, you will probably die in the next decade, but will be okay to work for at least a couple more years before things get bad). People in those cases can't/shouldn't give up their normal life because it's not over yet.
Ugh. This was SUCH a problem at my last job, it drove me crazy. I was a graduate research assistant in an educational reasearch lab, and by far the person on my project most knowledgeable about computers (when I wrote a VB macro to do a slow, time-consuming, repetitive task for us, you should have seen the awe it inspired).
We HAD a server to store things on, we HAD a nice little organizational system in which to store things for our project. Every file WAS, in fact, stored here - but every time someone changed something, they felt the need to email the file to everyone else in the group as well as saying "and it's on the G drive." And when I questioned this, people said they wanted to make sure we had a backup in case the G drive went down. Which is fine - but that is not the right way to back things up. We don't need *ten* copies in everyone's email boxes. But when I suggested to the project manager that I could set up a more efficient backup system, her eyes just kinda glazed over in that "Don't talk computers to me" way. So I remained the only person that would email about a file and just send the location rather than the file itself. *sigh* And people were always wondering why they were reaching their quotas!
Sorry I have no mod points for you.
Because, see, I think the point was that if the administration *were* in the pocket of big business, then they wouldn't be conducting this investigation.
But don't let me get in the way of what is obviously a well-rehearsed rant.
Whatever, they don't have to bribe the DJs. They just talk to one guy at Clear Channel, and suddenly hundreds (thousands?) of DJs across the country are told they must play this single once every three hours.
I agree that the labels do serve a purpose - but maybe the whole point is that it's time to find other means to that end. If radio stations weren't 90% owned by one of a couple huge corporations, I bet it'd be easier for indies to get airplay. The whole system needs a reboot. Maybe between online music downloads, podcasts, and satellite radio (I know, they're owned too, but the individual stations seem to have MUCH more freedom than, say, a Clear Channel station), that can happen.
It does? Most albums on iTunes cost $9.99. CDs cost around $15 on average, sometimes as much as $20 for a single disc. Older ones do cost less, and stores often put them on sale for $10-12. But there's still no way I'd say the average price of a new CD is less than $10. I'm not saying online music isn't overpriced - more that CDs are MORE overpriced, and I'm amazed this lawsuit was never brought in regards to them.
Hm, doesn't look like that worked.
One of my clearest memories of my grandmother's death is my grandfather sitting next to me at the funeral, sobbing so hard that his whole body was shaking.
Of course they are, but they're also sad that the child is moving away from them. Most people crying at funerals aren't nearly as sad for the person as they are for themselves, having lost the person.
However, having worked for Borders, I definitely see them as overall un-evil. I never felt like I was trying to "sell" things, just helping the customers. Unlike another bookstore I could mention (*cough*Booksamillion) - worked there for exactly one day, couldn't take their "YOU MUST SELL DISCOUNT CARDS!" attitude.
How well I remember surviving endless clothes-shopping in a regular (non-strip) mall, on the promise that I'd get to go to K*B afterwards.
That would be the main reason I'd see parents bringing their kids in.
However, as someone who's been there (not with antibiotics), using medicines that can cause worse problems than the original disease (but at least kill you more slowly) sucks overall. I am all in favor of any attempts to permanently replace these with something safer.
Heh, just before I got to this sentence I was thinking, dang, they should use that for chemo.
Some kids are going to like that, and some aren't. I never did. Had no interest whatsoever. I also knew from a fairly young age that I wanted to be a scientist, NOT an engineer. Before I really had a good idea what an engineer did, I had the vague idea that it wasn't for me, even though it's kind of the "cool" thing for a nerdy science/math-oriented kid to want to be when they grow up. Once I found out what they did, I KNEW it was not for me. (And then I went to MIT, and had to endure years of "Oh, so you're gonna be an engineer?" every time I told someone where I was attending college...)
Out of the things listed here, I would have been interested in approximately zero of them, even though I was very into science, math, and computers.
Not that I have many better suggestions off the top of my head, but just a note that not all kids who are destined to be techies are going to want to build things, so don't put all your eggs in that basket.
I'm sorry, but this is a horrible attitude. No, you don't want your kid to get *behind* in anything, but that doesn't have to come at the expense of something that they're ready and excited to get ahead in. There's no reason to hold your kid back if they're really ready to zoom ahead - being ahead in one subject (or all of them!) is NOT an automatic recipe for social failure and depression, despite what popular media would have you believe. Of course, your kid might start to prefer older friends to their age peers, but is that really so bad?
Because some of us have spouses who would force us to buy the crappy cheap hardware if they had the choice? I mean, my husband still has a computer that can't handle higher than redhat 6.5; if it weren't for the fact that 6.5 has some security holes and he can't use it for much more than IM and low-level web surfing he wouldn't let me replace it at all. We finally negotiated a used G3 iBook, though we have yet to buy it. If we could get a crappy but brand-new laptop for the same price and dual-boot OS X and Linux on it, no way would he let me have the iBook.
Yes, because people with major illnesses must spend every moment dealing with their illness. They have no time at all to kick back and relax and feel normal now and then.
So.... You're worried about the toxoplasmosis from a cat, but the possibility of getting salmonella from a reptile (or even a rodent) doesn't phase you?