Cabernet and Carboplatin

We said goodbye to our 24-year-old cat Stella on Thursday. It was obvious to us that it was time for her to leave us. All the sparkle had left her eyes and she showed little interest even in her favorite treats. Her legs were shaky and it was clear she was unhappy. She was diagnosed maybe a year ago with chronic renal failure, something many old cats succumb to. I had gone through this with several other cats and knew the drill. Special foods and subcutaneous fluids every day. I still had really good needles from my last go round, so I ordered fluids and got out the old IV stand. We were good to go. The fluids tend to make a cat feel better and I never had trouble administering them. But Stella hated it. As soon as we began she started working to wriggle the needle out from between her bony shoulders. After going through this for maybe about a week, I looked at her and said, Enough. I adopted Stella when she was 20, so I knew my time with her would not be measured in decades, or eve...

Today is quite an auspicious day for me. Two years ago today, I was at Johns Hopkins Hospital having my ovarian cancer surgery. I was “optimally debulked,” meaning the surgeon was successful in removing my tumors completely, along with cancerous lymph nodes, omentum, and any other cancer cells he saw, which I guess were scattered around my abdomen, colon, and rectum. Debulking is such an odd word, though I guess it is pretty descriptive, particularly when I think about how large those tumors were. To my knowledge the term is not used for tumor removal of any other type of cancer. At least according to Mr. (or is that Dr?) Google. And yes. I had to go back and correct what autocorrect thought should be “debunk,” not “debulk.” When my surgeon told me of the successful surgery, I naively asked him if I would need chemo. He looked at me as if I had lost my mind. His response was something like, “uh, yeah. You’ve got Stage 3 cancer.” How little I knew then. Now I probably know too much. ...