From: thaBadDawg

The Big Day

It has been just barely under 4 seemingly long months since I found out that I had Acute Lymphoblastic Leukemia (ALL for short) and that I had the fun little mutation of the Philadelphia Chromosome (PH+). There have been some rough stretches, but really, when all things are considered I’ve had a pretty blessed ride up to this point. I read stories of people with ALL or PH+ leukemias and you hear a lot of struggles, lots of pains and lots challenges that up to this point I haven’t been forced to go through. I’ve had a few rough days here and there, but when I look back at it, the physical torture that you hear about when people get cancer has largely been shielded from me. I have been blessed, and more importantly I’ve been grateful for those blessings.

On January 13th I checked into the hospital and started radiation that same day. For total body irradiation you stand in front of a wall, they aim the radiation producing machine at you and you aren’t supposed to move for the duration of the experience. That 9 plus minutes on the front and 9 plus minutes in the back. Adding a quick 20 second blast to the head for good measure, I was getting nuked for almost 20 minutes a day. I spent a lot of those days sleeping because there are two things that radiation really does to you… causes fatigue and makes you really nauseous. Took a few days to figure out the drug regiment to get the nausea somewhat under control, but we got it to the point where I was only puking once a day. I can handle that.

Next came the things that I think I was the most scared of… Cytoxan. The name of the chemo alone just scares you into thinking you’re going to die. Turns out it was one of the easiest chemos I’ve had. I had way more problems with the combination of Mercaptopurine (otherwise known as 6MP) and methotrexate. I used to say that methotrexate was not my friend, but we later figured out that it was most likely 6MP that was the culprit. More on this in a later post. But the Cytoxan, most likely because we had already figured out how to deal with the nausea during radiation treatments, came and went like it was no big deal.

The only scary part of the process came Monday when I got an anti-rejection treatment called ATG. If I remember the description properly, it is essentially a serum from rabbits that has antibodies that help rejection of transplants. It turns out that the rabbits have something against me, because Monday was one of my hardest days ever. Shortly after the bag was hung, I got these radical chills with intense shaking. Even under 4 blankets I couldn’t warm up. Finally the nurse asked for help on what to do and they gave me a shot of demerol. That took away the shaking, and eventually the chills, but then I got to the point where I was spiking a pretty intense fever of 38.9˚ C, or 102˚ F. I was so uncomfortable I couldn’t sleep and when blood pressures of 180 over 100 would register she would say stupid stuff like “I think it is supposed to do that.”  Shortly after the ATG was fully run in, still had a fever (bouncing between 38.4˚ and 38.7˚) but my blood pressure bottomed out pretty fast. 80 over 40 with a heart rate of 134. My dad described the problem as “your heart sucking really hard on a straw and not getting anything when it sucks.” It was scary enough that those of you who are friends with me on Facebook heard me make a plea that I have never made before and will most likely never make again. The staff on East 8th (the bone marrow transplant center) didn’t know what to do next, so they shipped me down to the ICU, which just turned out to be a waste of time because within an hour of me being there (and them doing nothing other than watching and saying, yeah, your blood pressure is low) my blood pressure came back up on it’s own and my heart rate started to drop. Sleeping and ICUs don’t go together, so I ended up taking a pretty long nap the day after when they let me come back up to my room on East 8th. I was so excited to get out of the ICU that my nurse asked if I would help push the bed and I said “Hell yeah I wil…” that’s how excited I was to get out of there.

Yesterday they decided that I didn’t need the second dose of ATG as it’s benefit is a marginal improvement over the first dose. As my doctor put it, “We put it to the uncle test. If this were my nephew and I was asked what to do, I would have said no.” So yesterday ended up being really boring, which I was all for because the previous day has sucked so incredibly badly that I was ready to just enjoy a nice relaxing day.

And that brings us to today. The start of my new life is today because I will finally be getting my new bone marrow. My wife wrote an amazing thank you letter to the donor which sums up my feeling way more eloquently than I could have come up with. This is where I get excited because this is like getting a contract extension on my lease on life. Instead of having a finite amount of time left (as in under a year) I still have the possibility of many many more years here. That’s not to say there won’t be challenges getting the new marrow to behave properly with my “old” body (34 isn’t old, but right now it feels old) and some of those challenges may suck royally, but as long as this new bone marrow takes, I can’t see how I don’t have a long amazing life ahead of me.

Return of dJake - thaBadPod#01 - Dynasty

So my wife has created a monster. For the past year I have been thinking about getting back into the DJ game and Jacoy went out and got me a DJ controller so I could get back into playing with stuff.

I’ve already outgrown my setup in just a month. I had to get me some speakers, because how else was I supposed to hear what I was mixing while I was trying to hear what I was going to mix in? And the software I have is best equated to a preview edition of what it can do. So I’ve been test driving other software, and I think I really want to upgrade to Traktor 2. But it has stuff in it that needs new toys to take the best advantage of that software. So many choices, so many decisions.

I can’t help but think that my wife was thinking of me being stuck in the hospital and needing to have multiple ways of keeping myself occupied. It’s the kind of thing that really makes the difference when you feel a need to change things up to break up the monotony.  There are only so many things you can do in a hospital room, and luckily DJ-ing is now one of them. Hence this lovely piece of work:

thaBadPod#01 - Dynasty

So on to the track list:

1. Dynasty (Dada Life Remix) - Kaskade
2. Don’t Stop The Party (Jump Smokers Remix) - Pitbull
3. Go Deep (Jesse Marco Who Bootleg) - Wax Motif & Neoteric
4. Lick It (Tommie Sunshine & Disco Fries Edit) - Kaskade & Skrillex
5. Skyfall (DJ Kue Remix) - Adele
6. Feel Good, Inc. (EasyTech Club Remix) - Gorillaz
7. Sexy And I Know It (Chris James Gangnam Style Blend) - LMFAO
8. Moves Like Jagger (Yanis S Remix) - Maroon 5 feat Christina Aguilera
9. Mama Told Me - Big Boi feat Kelly Rowland
10. Locked Out Of Heaven (Cazzette Answering Machine Remix) - Bruno Mars
11. Suit & Tie (Kidd Spin No-Halftime Edit) - Justin Timberlake feat Jay-Z
12. Whistle - Flo Rida

PS… I plan on doing a set of historical posts to get caught up on the goings on of the cancer fight. Hopefully will get to those soon. This week has been rather hellish on me.

Great news, bad day and professional ADD

A couple days ago I had a conversation with one of my bosses (I have so many these days it seems) and he coined a phrase that I think accurately describes one of my greatest weaknesses. He called it professional ADD, and I think it fits perfectly. Let’s say that I’m working on a project and it’s a long running one (which for me would be about a week) and somebody sends me an email describing a problem. Instead of filing the email away for later reply, or, punting the problem up the food chain, I sit there and contemplate the solution to the problem and tell whoever what I think the solution is. It isn’t to say that the solution is wrong, or that the problem doesn’t need to be solved, but instead of spending that 15 minutes contemplating how to complete the project I am on, or just writing code for the project I am on, I have allowed myself to be distracted. Professional ADD. I bet if you were to ask JT or KSwiss they’d have LOADS of stories about my professional ADD. So I have a new challenge… Fighting myself to keep my professional ADD so that it takes less than 10% of my time. The boss I was having the conversation with pointed out to me this is why he works 80 hours a week, because he has the same problem. A couple months ago I masked the problem pretty easily because I was working 60 hours a week. Unfortunately my stamina isn’t what it used to be and I can hit 40 hours pretty easily, but trying to push to 50 feels like climbing a mountain. And it is pure misery. It used to be that those extra 10 hours were like a fat kid running downhill… way too easy. And since the fat kid running downhill has a harder time hitting the brakes, similarly I’d miss the 50 hour mark and just keep on going to 60. I hope to get back there soon. And if I conquer my professional ADD by the time I get back there, watch out… nobody will be able to keep up with me.

The past couple days haven’t been fun for me. My digestive tract decided that it would be a good idea to start rebelling against me. And it is the kind of thing that just starts happening for no apparent reason (other than the fact that I am leukemia boy.) It was bad enough that yesterday I did the thing that I hate the most and opted to work from home. Working from home is a challenge because almost 2 year olds don’t understand the concept of “Daddy is working” and so getting your laptop pushed aside because he wants attention happens a couple times a day. Add to that a gut that is definitely not working the way it should be and you have a recipe for a great day. I went through so many tums yesterday that it wasn’t funny. And then to make everything even better, around 6 I started to get feverish and my temperature got all the way up to 100.8, which is .2 degrees short of me making a drive up to LDS hospital for admission. Luckily, the fever broke and I started to feel a little better, but from 3pm until just before I went to bed I was about as miserable as you can get. I’ve had a couple days like that over the past month, but they were usually tied to major events, like getting chemo. I don’t know what it was, and maybe it was the combination of getting the bone marrow biopsy, me pushing myself too hard and not drinking enough. I might never know. As I write this right now I don’t feel great, but I don’t feel like I did yesterday, so it’s an improvement.

Speaking of the bone marrow biopsy… They called me yesterday with the results. The measure of success in the induction phase (the initial phase in the fight against leukemia) is whether or not you can get the measurable leukemia load beneath 1% and I got all the way down to .1%. It turns out that I am a leukemia killing machine. So with those results in hand now it is time to go into the next phase, which technically is called the consolidation phase, but since I am planning on going through a bone marrow transplant, it really ends up being a mix of a consolidation phase and a intermediate maintenance phase. And this means that on Monday morning I check back into the hospital for a 3 to 6 day stay to get my next round of chemo. Apparently the chemo I am getting is some pretty nasty stuff because it goes in over a 24 hour period and it has the chance of doing liver and kidney damage and so I have to be closely monitored until the chemo clears my system. Here’s to hoping that it clears my system quickly so I don’t have to spend more than 3 days there. But knowing my body, it’ll hold onto some of that chemical nastiness just to torture me for an extra day or two just because it can.

And just in case you didn’t know… none of my siblings matched me for the transplant. Which sucks, but the good news is that they found two matches off of the national registry. How soon I get my transplant ultimately depends on when whoever my matches are decide to make themselves available for the transplant. So as early as January I could start my massive 6 week stay at the hospital. Although I am kind of hoping that it pushes into March because then that way we’ll be past the everybody is getting sick all of the time part of the year. But either way, I have a match and so I will be cured. 

Induction Phase Over… Almost

I’ve been out of the hospital for a week now. It’s been a great week of freedom and once you spend 2 and a half weeks in prison you never want to go back. Except that I know I have to go back, at least twice. A 5 day stay almost seems doable, but how I am going to survive 6 weeks is beyond me, but such is life. As long as I don’t get an infection during the whole transplant process I will be alive and kicking after that 6 weeks is over. What is 6 weeks in a lifetime? Just a small blip on the radar. At least, once you get past it. Unfortunately, from everything I’ve learned, there is no early parole for good behavior after a transplant. In fact, it is more common that they extend your stay because you don’t hit milestones. Let’s hope that I can at least get out on time.

Today was my last round of chemo in the first phase. In fact my blood work came back so good that my doctor said that she expects to find “one of the cleanest bone marrow biopsies of somebody to ever go through the induction phase” (or that’s mostly right… but close enough) I asked her if I could skip my chemo and she said that’s not how you get a clean bill of health after the induction phase. But last week they switched my anti-nausea medicine to what my nurse today called “the magic bullet” and it really is. I’ve been feeling a little run down today after the chemo, but nothing like what I felt like after the first couple courses of chemo. But no nausea, and I haven’t had to hit up any support medications to keep me going through the day. Tomorrow I’ll be in the office all day… and I’ll love it. (Yes, I love to work.)

Next Tuesday I get my bone marrow biopsy, and we find out how well I did in the induction phase. Assuming my doctor is right, I’ll have no detectable leukemia load in my bone marrow, and then we move into the next phase where we keep the leukemia locked down for a couple months until I am ready for the transplant. And that will really be the end of the induction phase.

The New Normal?

A month ago I was the kind of person who would work 12 hours in a day (even being pretty anemic) and it would just be a normal thing that I did. I would try to be in the office by 8:30 and by the time I would leave that night I would have put in a pretty significant effort for the day. And that would happen 5, sometimes 6 times a week. And I loved being able to do that because not only could I get what I planned to get done during the day, but it allowed me to handle the hurdles that come with being essentially a solo developer for a rather large user base rather easily.

Being in the hospital for 17 nights I got a false sense of what my life would be like because in the hospital I would have energy all day long, in fact, way too much energy it felt like. I’d go to bed between midnight and 1 in the morning and wake up for the day around 6 and be up for the day. Every once in a while I’d need to take a nap, but some of those I’m not sure weren’t done out of sheer boredom. Let’s face it, when you are doing the same routine every day the monotony of everything will eventually take a toll on you. But I never felt energy was an issue. And that’s what happens when you are pretty limited by your environment… you don’t burn off enough energy and you always feel good to go.

So on Tuesday I feel great, probably a little extra energized because I’m free again. I show up to the office a little later than normal, mostly because when you are trying to remember how to the do the basics like make your own breakfast again you end up taking a little longer on the morning routine, and I end up spending the next couple hours at the office getting caught up on the past 2 and a half weeks with everybody. (And getting the new lay of the land up at the Thanksgiving Point office where the Vivint development team lives now… it’s a pretty sick setup, and it is seriously 5 minutes away from my house which means I can still come home for dinner even if I am going to work late) And then I got setup at my desk and just kept on working on the project that I had started the last week like it was no big deal. Except around 9pm I felt like I ran into a dense fog, which wasn’t at all normal for me. I pushed through to almost 10, but I’m pretty sure I didn’t write any useful code in that last hour. Came home, sat on the couch with Jacoy and went to bed a little earlier than usual at 11:30.

Got 8 hours of sleep that night, went into the office yesterday and started pounding away at my project, but by 1pm I was effectively dead. Maybe JT would argue that I gave myself too much sleep (which might not be too far from the truth) but I am pretty sure that if I would have been anywhere near my bed or couch that I could have easily passed out for a couple hours. But even with drinking all of the caffeine that I could get my hands on, I was still struggling pretty hard for the rest of the day. And I’m sure that my performance in the interviews I was sitting in on was less than stellar. I was pretty glad last night that Brendon understood what I was trying to get at and helped me articulate my questions when my brain was failing me. And boy was my brain failing my last night. Even basic conversations with people I work with was a challenge yesterday afternoon.

My doctor warned me when I got out of the hospital that I was going to need to take it easy. Internally I laughed because I felt so great. And really, if you see me you see me, you can’t tell that I am sick. I guess I hide it well. But after two days of being back at the office I’ve realized that there really has been a change since I started fighting leukemia. I can’t go all day anymore it appears. We’ll see how today goes, but I bet that if it goes as I expect it to, the new normal for me might be an 8 hour day. I’ve never been a big fan of the 8 hour day because it always felt so limiting… but if that’s all I have in the tank then I guess that’s all I have. I’m hoping that in the next phase of this treatment, when I’m not on weekly chemo doses, that I’ll be able to get back up to a more normal production level at work.

PS… I wanted to give a huge shout out to my boy Ty Williams, who is a freaking creative genius. And it’s not only because he made a super sick wrist band in my honor, because that’s pretty cool too. As long as I’ve known Ty he’s been coming up with some of the coolest designs and I’ve never not been impressed with his work. And it’s just something he does on the side, because he’s still doing the sales manager thing every year and completely killing it there too. When he retires from his sales gig and goes into a full-time design and advertising career (which is where his true calling is, IMHO) he’s going to kill it there too.

I’ve been told that these freaking sick wristbands are at the Vivint corporate headquarters at the front desk. So if you are in Provo then you have easy access to them. Maybe I’ll see if Ty likes me enough to give me a grip that I can keep at my house so y’all still have a good excuse to come see me ;)

Better Than Expected

In the battle with leukemia you break it up into phases. The first phase, which I am in, is called the induction phase. The primary goal of the induction phase is to administer a heavy amount of damage to the leukemia cells that have taken up residence and drive them out of existence. In my case they’ve done this with a combination of three different chemo drugs and prednisone (the worst of the worst of drugs if you ask me) to start this fight off. In a normal progression of the induction phase, the immune system gets completely wiped out somewhere between day 10 and 14. Something unusual happened with me in that my WBC and ANC counts never bottomed out. In fact, my ANC today is in a perfectly normal range. There are some theories as to why my system never completely shutdown, and most of them point out to the way they are treating my particular mutation of leukemia.

All that being said, there’s no point in keeping me in the hospital any longer. The primary reason for being in the hospital was to keep what was supposed to be a completely eradicated immune system safe from the outside world and my immune system decided that it was going to withstand the chemo and stay up and running. So instead of having a 31 day stay at LDS Hospital, I am leaving on day 18. I still have a long fight ahead of me, but I much rather would do said fight in the free world than in my 12 by 12 prison cell of a hospital room. My doctors feel that treating me on an outpatient basis until the transplant is going to be safe and I feel like being back in the real world again. I’ll still have to come back for a stay or two between now and the transplant, but they will be short sweet stays instead of long grueling stays.

So tonight’s plan is to go for a long walk in the neighborhood. Out in the open air. No mask, no gloves (unless maybe it is cold enough for gloves) and just enjoy the freedom. Sweet, blessed, freedom.

Lessons You Learn From A Long Stay

The interesting thing about being the boring patient is that there’s nothing exciting to report anymore. Which is a good thing really, but it leads to a lot of my own personal boredom, something that working takes the edge off of, but being stuck in a 12 x12 room 23 hours a day just has lost it’s appeal. Actually, it lost it’s appeal once I walked through the doors of this place, but there are some injustices you have to endure to get healthy.

I’m starting to debate whether or not it is the chemo that is working on killing my leukemia or the hospital food. The food is best described as edible, but the reality of it is that every meal I eat here I end up feeling like crap. And the funny thing is that it only happens when I eat the food the hospital provides. Now, there is the possibility that the chemo is really messing with my digestive tract, but my mom brought me dinner last night and my system decided that it was going to play nice after that. And that’s including getting to eat some wonderful cheesecake from the Cheesecake Factory. Speaking of which…

The awesomeness of my friends and family continue to astound me. I feel the faith, the prayers and I am truly grateful for all of it. Especially Bowdy and how he made me and my wife’s night last night with the cheesecake ;)

One last thought about the food. I hate to complain about anything because the reality of my situation is that I am getting amazing care, my body is recovering exceptionally well, but I really am starting to think that I could live off of jerky, nuts and chips rather than the stuff they insist on preparing here.

I’ve discovered that when you are in a hospital room for 23 hours a day your muscles start to atrophy rather quickly. A couple days ago my labs showed that immune system was starting to pick back up on its own. Which leads to a fun side note… I asked my doctors if this is normal, and the response was “We’ve seen this before” which I translate to mean “You know, this happens sometimes, and we are baffled as to why it happens, but look at you go!” Anyways… I walked out the front doors of the hospital and went for a walk around the block. Walking up the west side of the block I got completely spent, and coming down the backside of the block my legs were super wobbly walking down the hill. Not only is the prednisone I am taking doing a number on my muscles, but the fact that I am doing relatively nothing for 23 hours a day has left my muscles withering away. You never realize that the muscle mass is a disappearing until two weeks later when you climb a flight of stairs only to realize there is no more push in your legs.

So being the proactive sort that I am, I asked my doctor for a physical therapy consult… not so much because I need somebody to hold my hands, but it is always easier when you have somebody who is keeping tabs on what you are doing. The paid torturers (whom I definitely need) came in and gave me a set of what are simple exercises, but because I’ve spent 13 days doing nothing but sitting and laying around, those simple exercises are real challenges. Which is actually good for me… because I need something to break up the monotony of playing on my computer all day and eating and sleeping. And my legs used to be strong… I need them to be strong again. And it is something to work on. Strong body means strong recovery.

Mental sanity is hard in a long term stay like this. Even with distractions that both visitors and work can give me, there is still the challenge of keeping your mind focused when the scenery never changes. Writing code really helps keep the mind sharp, but when you never get to go get into pick up meetings, never get invited into discussions about how the future of the program is shaping up, never get to work on solving problems with other people… your mind starts to slip. Never getting to do the drive to and from work you never get to reset your mind from work mode to home mode and vice versa. You never realize how important those transitions are until you don’t have them anymore. Your mind is always in the same place so it never has a natural reset. Which means you have to fight that much harder to keep your mind sharp. Unfortunately, the last couple days have seen me on the losing side of that battle. But such is life. You have good days and you have bad ones… the goal is to make the bad ones as minimal as possible.

The great news is that my immune system seems to be rebooting itself on its own. The combination of my amazing medical staff and the faith and miracles of God have given me an amazing recovery so far. The doctors like my progress and I figure that if I keep following their direction then I’ll be in a good strong position to really fight hard through the next phases of this fight.

Getting chemo

Let’s just start this off by saying that getting intentionally poisoned is not a fun thing. In fact, you spend the whole day dreading it and then the next two days trying to recover from it. One of the chemo’s they give me has a half life of nearly 200 hours… so even after I leave the hospital there will be poison in my system. I guess that’s what you do when you fight to win… you fight dirty.

The bag you see hanging high on the tree is a fun little drug called Vincristine which is the main reason you see lots of people with no hair when they are getting treated for cancer. The main goal of this drug is to interrupt the process of rapidly dividing cells, which is something leukemia cells like to do. In my case it appears the Vincristine is doing it’s job quite well, because the labs they run show good stuff coming back and bad stuff going away.This is the one that has the super long half life… which I suspect means that this is the one that keeps on building up. 

In this little brown bag my nurse is holding is a red tube of goo known as Daunorubicin, which is the really heavy duty killer of the mix. While the Vincristine is trying to inhibit the growth pattern of the cells, Daunrubicin is going and and committing mass murder on these cells. It has a pretty short half life… clearing out of the system just after a day. I suspect that this drug is the one kicking my butt the most in the more immediate aftermath of getting poisoned.

And then finally, we have the poison actually hooked up and running into my system. And unfortunately, I can taste it. Don’t know how to describe it other than it isn’t a pleasant taste. I suspect that because it pumps straight into my central line it gets into the tongue where the taste buds live and do a little stimulation on the backside of those nerves. It’s not a pleasant taste so I like to suck on a jolly rancher to help keep the taste at bay. And since they inject it over a 15 minute period, that’s a lot of taste to get rid of.

This week has been a little rougher than last week, because I am definitely feeling the effects stronger than last week. I suspect that means round 3 and round 4 are going to be rougher too… but that’s what you do when you want to kill something. You make sure that it is knocked on it’s butt and killed off before you walk away. Might be a pain, but it is better than the alternative. As my boss Tanguy likes put it… “THIS IS SPARTA!!!”

Motivation and Outlook

I talk to people. (Shocking, I know) And people are amazed at how well I am taking this challenge on. Even as much as I am believing within myself that I know I am going to beat this thing (which is a central part of my outlook) I know there are factors that are so beyond my control that all I can do is hope that they break my way. Which gets me a central theme that I think has powered my life.

You control what you can control, and you learn to accept that which you cannot control. I can’t control the fact that my white blood cells mutated into a collection of leukemic producing monsters. It is a done deal. Getting sad and depressed over it won’t change the fact that I have leukemia, and getting sad and depressed over it won’t help me any in this fight. In fact, I believe the opposite ends up being true in almost all cases… getting sad and depressed about things you can’t control negatively affects you in the things you can control.

Using another example from earlier this year… when I was working for MoneyReef and it was sold to MoneyDesktop I had no control over that process. I was just along for the ride. This isn’t to suggest that I have anything against MoneyDesktop, in fact I love the energy of that place and the skill and talent of a lot of the engineers they have there. Situationally for me it was just a bad move. That being said, what me, Heber, Cragun and LJ were working on at MoneyReef was something I believed in, I had passion in, I was excited to work on. With maybe one or two weird exceptions, EVERY day I loved going to work and quite often it didn’t feel like work, but it felt like I was going to have fun. Ask anybody who knew me at that point… I was loving my life like crazy. When the transition hit and I realized the changes it was going to mean for me, I tried to be excited for the move, I really did. But it meant going from a scenario where I was supremely comfortable to one where I was quite literally a fish out of water. (it’s a programming language and culture thing… Ruby is a tough language to master and Rubyist tend to see the world a little differently, but the one positive thing that it did was get me excited to get back into Python again) I can’t tell you that I was as excited to go to work every day, or that I was as passionate about it as I was a month before, but I still attacked the challenges and made the best of them. And my wife probably appreciated the MoneyDesktop situation a little more than the MoneyReef and Vivint work situations because she got to see a whole lot more of me ;) The fun postscript on this story is that a month after MoneyDesktop acquired MoneyReef, JT decided that he had to acquire me back for Vivint Solar, which in the long run has been one of the greatest things ever. One of these days when I have the time to write about the awesomeness of JT it will be a very long and epic post.

The point of all this is that even when things don’t go the way you want, you still control your attitude. Finding motivation to succeed in the face of poor attitude will be next to impossible. If Obama gets elected this upcoming November (a real possibility considering that roughly 50% of Americans are quite literally not smart enough to vote) it will be a hard thing to say “Yeah, America is a great place and I still have a good chance of being successful in life.” But that being said, I can’t control what the voters do. If Obama get another 4 more years then it is out of my control. I can either choose to try and find my best path in life, love and success, or I can wallow in the misery of there’s no point in trying. (We’re going to stop talking about this because otherwise this will turn into a completely politically charged post.) I can’t control other people. I can try to influence them, but I have no control over what they do. My only choice is how I choose to react.

Point 1, I control what I control, and I learn to accept what I do not control. 
Point 2, I have to play to win. 

Let’s face it, if you aren’t playing to win something then you have already lost. This isn’t to say that you always have to be right. In fact, I have learned that the vast majority of the time my wife is right and I am wrong. The “win” that comes from that is accepting that she is right and choosing to follow that course and the “lose” that comes from that is trying to fight to prove that I am right, which ultimately proves that I am wrong. Winning doesn’t mean that you get everything and everybody else gets nothing. I’ve learned in the process of raising kids that defeating them is quite often a loss for both me and the child. Winning in that scenario is making sure that a positive result is reached for both sides.

In this specific scenario, leukemia cannot win and I must. If my doctor tells me that beating leukemia requires that I learn how to pull off 100 1 armed pushups, then no matter how hard the fight, I must figure out how to do 100 1 armed pushups. Doing 99 and saying that you can’t do the last one just means that you don’t want to win and therefore cancer wins. The secret is that if you can’t see yourself doing the 100 1 armed pushups, you never will do the 100 1 armed pushups because you can’t see the path to get it done. For me the path has been setup in such a way that I know exactly what needs to be done. Most of it is work that either my body must do independent of anything I can will, or work that the medical staff must do. Even with that being said, the motivation is something that I can internalize. (This actually gets into the discussion of faith and mustard seeds and mountains, but that, once again, is a whole other post) I want to live a long healthy life. In this regard, two months ago my motivation wasn’t very high, but that was because I didn’t take time to look at the overall perspective. And maybe that’s the true challenge with motivation is getting to understand the overall perspective. Two months ago I never considered that my relatively sedentary lifestyle had a negative effect on my overall quality of life. My perspective was limited in the sense that I still enjoyed my quality of life without taking into account how much higher my quality of life could be.

I ultimately have three outcomes here… 1) I go through this fight, kill leukemia and have a great life. 2) Leukemia overpowers me and I am done with my mortal life (which isn’t the end of me, but just the end of me being here) or there’s the one that I think really scares my wife, 3) I go through this fight, think we kill off leukemia, but not really because it comes back years later. (We won’t know if I am really cured until 2018, but we’ll have a reasonable idea of whether I am in the clear at the beginning of 2015) Medical and faith aside, my risk factors are low so I have a really good chance at #1. And while #2 and #3 are possibilities, dwelling on the negativity doesn’t help me get any closer at #1. I would make the challenge that if you look at the picture as a whole, visualizing anything but your ideal outcome allows for the risk factors that you can control to take stronger hold. Hence, while #2 and #3 may be possibilities, #1 is the only one I focus on.

Say what you want about any challenge you have in your way. As long as you can make a path through the challenge, you will beat said challenge. Even when the challenge is potentially fatal… You control what you control, and you fight like hell to win.