A Very Local Desert

By coincidence, a kind friend gave me a plant of my choice just as I was mulling over options for what to do with a bed in which I have so far failed to grow anything much. The chief reason for its lack of productivity seems to be the way the eaves of the house overhang it and block the rain, creating a miniature desert. Since the bed does get some direct sunlight despite the overhang, I decided to try planting hardy succulents. The eastern prickly-pear cactus (Opuntia humifusa) is actually native to this region, so I got a couple of those and added a few hens-and-chicks (Sempervivum sp.). There's lots of space left for the cactuses to grow and the hens-and-chicks to spread. We'll see how it goes!

My new succulent bed

If I'm planting a new garden bed, does that mean I'm on top of things in my garden? Most definitely not! But it's more fun to add new things than to weed old ones yet again. Hence the succulent bed!

I have been feeling fairly well lately, and I have now regained all the weight I lost in 2024 and the first weeks of 2025. But my strength and stamina are still lower than I'd like. It makes me very unsure about what to take on and how much to commit to. Hopefully that will come clear over time. Meanwhile, I'm walking and doing yoga to try to get stronger.

Strong Enough to Survive a Big Weekend

I've just had the busiest weekend yet since my diagnosis, and I made it through! We attended a wedding in Virginia at which we saw many old, dear friends. Wisely, we decided to stay the night there rather than trying to drive home late the same night. Then on the way home we stopped off to visit some more friends. 

Getting ready to attend the wedding

All in all, it was a big, social weekend—the more so because Gita came to share it with us.

Gita came too.

I had not managed such a large social event for over a year and a half. When I tried to attend a family wedding last year, I ended up having to stay in the hotel room feeling sick while Anand and Gita went to the wedding. So the weekend was a triumph: a happy time with the bride and groom, a chance to catch up with old friends, and a demonstration of significant improvement in my health.

Then yesterday I had my next Keytruda (immunotherapy) infusion. The infusion sessions are much shorter now without the chemo drugs, and the aftermath is much less unpleasant. I'll stay on the Keytruda for two years, my oncologist says, after which it would not be expected to do me any further good. Hopefully the effects will stick and/or there will be new treatment options coming along at that point.

My Other Goal Completed

I wrote a post back in March about my goals for the year. My primary goal is to survive the year, and I'm very pleased to be well on track for that one. My secondary goal was to see the second edition of my book, The Writing Revolution: Cuneiform to the Internet, through its final stages in press and onto literal or virtual bookshelves. I am happy to report that it is now out, as pictured below.

Author's copies of my new second edition

My editor at Wiley says I can share the promotional code WRRV2 for 20% off for anyone who wants to order a copy from Wiley's website.

My thanks to the folks at Wiley who helped make this second edition possible!

Thinking back to the first edition, I realize that there is a common thread between the two editions, which is, oddly enough, my mortality. I first had the idea for a book about writing systems as an undergraduate, but I didn't do anything about it for some years. Knowing that the field of linguistics didn't take the study of writing systems seriously, I thought I had better get tenure first and then write the book.

Well, life didn't turn out the way I'd planned, and instead of finding myself in a tenure-track position at a university, I found myself making standardized tests at the Educational Testing Service (ETS). Then I found myself beset with an undiagnosed illness that left me exhausted, bone-deep. I was so drained that for a while I wondered if I was going to die. It occurred to me then that I still had unfinished business: for one thing, I had not yet written that book about writing systems! I couldn't write it then, in that condition; but I eventually regained much of my health, at which point I gathered my courage, quit my job, and sat down to write. 

The question now is,  What will I write or otherwise tackle next, with the measure of health I've regained?

Good News

I've just returned from a visit to my oncologist, where I got the results of last week's scan. I had been expecting to get them a bit earlier, but they kept not coming through. Finally, at Gita's wise suggestion, I called the radiologists' office this morning and told them I needed the results for my appointment this afternoon. I stressed that it was for my oncology appointment, since I've noticed that cancer gets a person priority treatment from the medical system. They promised to expedite the report, and sure enough, by the time I got to the oncology office the report had arrived.

And the news is good! There has been further tumor shrinkage since my last scan in late April. There is some uncertainty as to exactly how much, since that scan was a PET and this one was a CT, and PETs have somewhat larger uncertainties as to sizing. Another source of uncertainty is that we don't know whether the shrinkage happened in the early part of the intervening time and was due to the residual effects of chemotherapy in my system or whether the immunotherapy drug acting alone is responsible for at least some of it. 

At any rate, it seems clear that the immunotherapy is at least holding the line against progression of the cancer, and that is the main thing. My oncologist said that outcomes are similar whether a person has tumor regression (shrinkage) or stable disease. It's progression that is bad news, and that is not at all what we are seeing.

I am relieved and overjoyed!

One thing I had been a bit worried about was the possibility that I would fritter away the remainder of my life by living scan to scan. In other words, I was concerned that I would never feel free to make plans or set goals because there would always be another scan coming within three months' time that could at any point make all those plans and goals moot. And then I would end up doing nothing with my remaining time. With this good news, though, I feel more confident that I can avoid that pitfall. I am still in all likelihood going to die of mesothelioma, but not this year. And at this rate probably not next year either. For now, that's enough to be going on with. 

So now I've got some life-rebuilding to do! A challenge in this respect is that the immunotherapy causes significant fatigue, as does cancer itself. So I will need to continue to be careful with my energies. But meanwhile I intend to have some good experiences with the energy I have!

Scanned

Yesterday I went for a CT scan, one of what will be a series of alternating PET and CT scans every three months. The CT scan shows better size and location resolution, while the PET is better at picking up tumor activity. It will be a few days before the results come back, probably. 

I've been saying "I'll think about that after my scan" to myself a lot lately. A good result of the CT scan would be "stable disease," which would mean that the cancer has not started progressing since I stopped chemo. And that in turn would mean that I might get a decent spell of what they call "progression-free survival" in which to do things, live life, and envision a future. If the result is not so good, it may mean that more chemo will dominate my near future.

Meanwhile, last week's tests all came back negative except for the blood test that said I had elevated cortisol levels. All that means, I think, is that being sick for most of a week had stressed me out! However, I continue to do much better back on the anti-nausea medication, which has the added benefit of being an appetite stimulant and thus helps me keep up my caloric intake. I can't say that I feel all that well, though—I tire very easily, for one thing.

In between spells of illness and fatigue I've tried to do some things out in the garden. My peach tree is yielding lots of peaches, though we have to cut worms (actually larval plum curculios, Conotrachelus nenuphar) out of most of them before we eat them. (At least the peaches are organically grown! Next year I might resort to pesticides.) In more pest news, this morning I seem to have gotten myself into a nest of ticks. I felt a slight tickle and looked down to find a whole swarm of nearly microscopic baby ticks crawling up my arm. At least the littlest ones don't carry diseases (I think), as they have not yet had a chance to bite anything that carries a disease. But it was an unpleasant experience nonetheless!

The first year of a good peach harvest. 

For those who have kindly asked about my tooth, it's been a situation of no big news. Neither the dentist nor the endodontist could find anything structurally wrong with it. The endodontist gave me a short course of a steroid medication to see if that would reduce the inflammation in the nerve. It did not do anything dramatic, though it might have helped a bit. The pain has lessened gradually over the weeks, however, and now it doesn't bother me all that much unless I eat something cold. Even so I am now able to eat some refrigerated foods again. I have yet to dare frozen food again, however: the summer is progressing, and I haven't been able to eat ice cream for over a month!