We don't think we are getting good value for our tax dollars.The message from the Occupy-Wall-Streeters:
We don't think we are getting good value from other people's tax dollars.
2011-10-11
The Difference Between The Tea Partiers and The Occupy-Wall-Streeters
The message from the Tea Partiers:
2011-10-03
Post Ablation Report
Hi folks
This should be the last update for a while.
We went through the ablation process last week and had the full-body-scan this morning. The results are that all the right parts are lit up nicely like they've absorbed the iodine and should be killed. The scan revealed a couple of suspicious bright spots in my upper chest, but those are probably just lymph nodes and while they may have cancer they are lit up with the iodine so they should also be killed.
The scan also revealed more thyroidal cells in my tongue than would be expected normally, but again, they are lit up properly. This is most probably because in pre-birth development the thyroid actually develops from the same group of cells that the tongue does, but it is not a concern.
At this point there's no reason to assume that the treatment hasn't been successful.
I'm back on my thyroid hormones and eating normal food again. My energy level crashed during the ablation period, but is coming back, and we should be on track to being normal again for next week.
The next step is to get onto a stable dose of the long-term thyroid hormone and monitor various blood chemical levels. Also there we will repeat the iodine scan in six- to eight-months or so; that will require me being on the iodine diet again for a couple of weeks, then another radioactive iodine dose although not nearly as large as what I received last week. It is hoped that the magic thyrogen drug will be more generally available then and I won't have to go through the hormone withdrawal as well.
If all goes well, there shouldn't be any more intervention-type treatments to go through for this.
I would like to thank everyone for their support over the last while, it really made a difference.
This should be the last update for a while.
We went through the ablation process last week and had the full-body-scan this morning. The results are that all the right parts are lit up nicely like they've absorbed the iodine and should be killed. The scan revealed a couple of suspicious bright spots in my upper chest, but those are probably just lymph nodes and while they may have cancer they are lit up with the iodine so they should also be killed.
The scan also revealed more thyroidal cells in my tongue than would be expected normally, but again, they are lit up properly. This is most probably because in pre-birth development the thyroid actually develops from the same group of cells that the tongue does, but it is not a concern.
At this point there's no reason to assume that the treatment hasn't been successful.
I'm back on my thyroid hormones and eating normal food again. My energy level crashed during the ablation period, but is coming back, and we should be on track to being normal again for next week.
The next step is to get onto a stable dose of the long-term thyroid hormone and monitor various blood chemical levels. Also there we will repeat the iodine scan in six- to eight-months or so; that will require me being on the iodine diet again for a couple of weeks, then another radioactive iodine dose although not nearly as large as what I received last week. It is hoped that the magic thyrogen drug will be more generally available then and I won't have to go through the hormone withdrawal as well.
If all goes well, there shouldn't be any more intervention-type treatments to go through for this.
I would like to thank everyone for their support over the last while, it really made a difference.
2011-09-23
World Getting Smaller... Again
I noticed this to some extent when I had the surgery in June, but this time somehow the experience is harder to go through.
As we approach the time when I'll do the ablation process, I can feel my world slowly getting smaller and smaller with each day that passes. It starts in small ways -- the expected limitations from withdrawing the thyroid hormone changing the way my brain works and the way my body feels. Then losing my clearance to drive, making me dependent on others for flexible transportation. But I figured I could always take the bus outside my front door to Bayshore or something if I wanted to get out on my own.
Last Friday I was at the old office and decided that instead of waiting for someone to drive me home, I'd just walk. It's only 3KM (2.8, according to the GPS track I made of the walk) so no big deal -- I once walked in Toronto from the Queensway to the foot of the CN tower, a walk of about 3 hours, just because I had the time to kill (and OK because I didn't understand the way the buses in Toronto worked) -- so no big deal. Well that turned out to be a mistake as I was exhausted all weekend from that.
Now, walking up the hill twice a day with the boys for school is getting to be too much and I need naps in the afternoon.
I can't consider the bus ride without an escort, just in case, and I can't walk down to the store at the end of the street by myself without an escort, just in case. (Of course the diet means there's no point in walking down to the end of the street these days since I can't eat or drink anything once I get there.)
It is frustrating, especially considering that I still have a week of this diet and no hormone -- and the hardest part, the ablation, is still to come. For 48 hours following the radiation does, I have to stick to my room with meals dropped off at the door. No visitors.
For the surgery, it was the same kind of thing, but much faster: last drive the night before surgery, last meal the night before surgery, last drink, then no wallet, no glasses, no watch, no ring, and finally as I was wheeled into the operating theater -- no nothing, just me as a hunk of meat on a table. And then over the following three weeks those things slowly came back to me and my world's boundaries were pushed out again.
At least I know those boundaries will be pushed back out again, that I'm not at a high risk of being permanently restricted.
As we approach the time when I'll do the ablation process, I can feel my world slowly getting smaller and smaller with each day that passes. It starts in small ways -- the expected limitations from withdrawing the thyroid hormone changing the way my brain works and the way my body feels. Then losing my clearance to drive, making me dependent on others for flexible transportation. But I figured I could always take the bus outside my front door to Bayshore or something if I wanted to get out on my own.
Last Friday I was at the old office and decided that instead of waiting for someone to drive me home, I'd just walk. It's only 3KM (2.8, according to the GPS track I made of the walk) so no big deal -- I once walked in Toronto from the Queensway to the foot of the CN tower, a walk of about 3 hours, just because I had the time to kill (and OK because I didn't understand the way the buses in Toronto worked) -- so no big deal. Well that turned out to be a mistake as I was exhausted all weekend from that.
Now, walking up the hill twice a day with the boys for school is getting to be too much and I need naps in the afternoon.
I can't consider the bus ride without an escort, just in case, and I can't walk down to the store at the end of the street by myself without an escort, just in case. (Of course the diet means there's no point in walking down to the end of the street these days since I can't eat or drink anything once I get there.)
It is frustrating, especially considering that I still have a week of this diet and no hormone -- and the hardest part, the ablation, is still to come. For 48 hours following the radiation does, I have to stick to my room with meals dropped off at the door. No visitors.
For the surgery, it was the same kind of thing, but much faster: last drive the night before surgery, last meal the night before surgery, last drink, then no wallet, no glasses, no watch, no ring, and finally as I was wheeled into the operating theater -- no nothing, just me as a hunk of meat on a table. And then over the following three weeks those things slowly came back to me and my world's boundaries were pushed out again.
At least I know those boundaries will be pushed back out again, that I'm not at a high risk of being permanently restricted.
2011-09-22
Radiation I
Hi folks
Week 1 of the low-iodine diet is complete. With two weeks off the artificial thyroid hormone and a week of changed diet, I'm starting to slow down somewhat, so I'm more or less off of work from this point in.
Tuesday we went into the General for the first round of radiation testing: the imaging scan and the uptake test. On Tuesday there was a bit of a mystery happening, as they told us they were only going to take two images with the radioactive tracer in me -- then they immediately took three! They then decided that they wanted an all-around series of higher-resolution images, and a CT scan, so we had to wait for a time spot on the machine to get those done. Through all this they told us there wasn't anything to worry about.
When we went back on Wednesday for the uptake test, they showed us the results of the imaging sequence. I have some kind of proto-thyroidal duct down the back of where the thyroid used to be, probably a remnant of my pre-birth development. Since I don't have a thyroid any more, this tissue is trying to act like a thyroid and so lights up the same way that a thyroid would. The doctors have decided that this tissue is at low-risk for turning cancerous and will very probably be killed by the ablation process anyways. So nothing to worry about.
So the next step is the ablation on Wednesday afternoon, followed by the full-body scan the following Monday.
Week 1 of the low-iodine diet is complete. With two weeks off the artificial thyroid hormone and a week of changed diet, I'm starting to slow down somewhat, so I'm more or less off of work from this point in.
Tuesday we went into the General for the first round of radiation testing: the imaging scan and the uptake test. On Tuesday there was a bit of a mystery happening, as they told us they were only going to take two images with the radioactive tracer in me -- then they immediately took three! They then decided that they wanted an all-around series of higher-resolution images, and a CT scan, so we had to wait for a time spot on the machine to get those done. Through all this they told us there wasn't anything to worry about.
When we went back on Wednesday for the uptake test, they showed us the results of the imaging sequence. I have some kind of proto-thyroidal duct down the back of where the thyroid used to be, probably a remnant of my pre-birth development. Since I don't have a thyroid any more, this tissue is trying to act like a thyroid and so lights up the same way that a thyroid would. The doctors have decided that this tissue is at low-risk for turning cancerous and will very probably be killed by the ablation process anyways. So nothing to worry about.
So the next step is the ablation on Wednesday afternoon, followed by the full-body scan the following Monday.
2011-09-12
Preparations continue
Time for another infrequent update.
I have begun the preparations for the Ablation treatment. I stopped taking the artificial thyroid hormone last Tuesday, and so far I've been OK. There have been a couple of rough days, but for the most part I am not making mistakes and feel physically OK so I am still working. Not driving though, that's a pain.
Tomorrow we start the next phase: starting the low-iodine diet. I want to thank everyone who's had ideas about how to get through this two a half week stage. My mom went down to the states and found a container of non-iodized salt, and we've found lots of recipies and substitutes for the things I do eat, so I think we should do OK through it.
The first radiation dose is not until the 20th, and will be a small dose for the uptake test.
So we are making good progress through this.
Thanks everyone for sending your wishes and ideas.
I have begun the preparations for the Ablation treatment. I stopped taking the artificial thyroid hormone last Tuesday, and so far I've been OK. There have been a couple of rough days, but for the most part I am not making mistakes and feel physically OK so I am still working. Not driving though, that's a pain.
Tomorrow we start the next phase: starting the low-iodine diet. I want to thank everyone who's had ideas about how to get through this two a half week stage. My mom went down to the states and found a container of non-iodized salt, and we've found lots of recipies and substitutes for the things I do eat, so I think we should do OK through it.
The first radiation dose is not until the 20th, and will be a small dose for the uptake test.
So we are making good progress through this.
Thanks everyone for sending your wishes and ideas.
2011-09-11
Fact Checking 9/11
Claim:
I [...] hate to fact-check you[,] but Wikipedia claims total motor vehicle deaths for the entire US was 42,196 for 2001, which works out to 811 per week, or 115.6 per day. Even if we round up, we'd have to assume that day to statistically have been exceptionally bad to account for almost an average month's worth of motor vehicle deaths through the entire country. (I couldn't find per-week statistics for motor vehicle deaths for the time period surrounding 9/11, as I'd expect them to be higher since nobody could fly for two days and many more people ended up on the road -- plus even more people were irrationally scared off of flying and ended up driving for weeks, or months, afterwards).
(Also I see that the total motor vehicle death toll for 2001 was lower than both 2000 AND 2002.)
What would be more interesting would be to see if you could correlate the increase in highway deaths to the costly and intrusive security theatre that the US has indulged in since then with a proportionate drop in flying, since if someone drives rather than flies, they are statistically more likely to be hurt (air travel is still has the lowest fatalities-per-passenger-mile-traveled) and compare THAT increased number to the 9/11 death toll (and then compare that number to the costs spent on security theatre, essentially calculating how much the US is spending per death to kill more of its citizens).
I'm not trying to disagree with you, I think it is high time the western world got over this stupid obsession. However in the long run, facts will beat hyperbole.
Update:
Wikipedia again: It is often reported that air travel is the safest in terms of deaths per passenger mile. The National Transportation Safety Board (2006) reports 1.3 deaths per hundred million vehicle miles for travel by car, and 1.7 deaths per hundred million vehicle miles for travel by air. These are not passenger miles. If an airplane has 100 passengers, then the passenger miles are 100 times higher. The number of deaths per passenger mile on commercial airlines in the United States between 1995 and 2000 is about 3 deaths per 10 billion passenger miles.
Yahoo! Answers, quoting WebMD: There are about 56 million deaths each year worldwide. About 1.7 million are the result of traffic accidents. That would mean the percent of deaths around the world annually as a result of traffic accidents is about 3%.
Assuming these figures are correct, then that gives an average daily death toll of motor vehicles as 4657 (call it 4700). So world wide, your argument probably holds.
SkyscraperCity: The Geneva-based organization said 1,292 people died in plane crashes in 2006 -- a drop of 11 percent on the previous year.
It occurs to me that neither value can seriously be compared unless we see the passenger-mile-traveled for both types of transport.
But I think I'm beating a dead horse here, so I'm off.
More people died in motor vehicle accidents on 9/11 than died in the terrorist attack that day.My response:
I [...] hate to fact-check you[,] but Wikipedia claims total motor vehicle deaths for the entire US was 42,196 for 2001, which works out to 811 per week, or 115.6 per day. Even if we round up, we'd have to assume that day to statistically have been exceptionally bad to account for almost an average month's worth of motor vehicle deaths through the entire country. (I couldn't find per-week statistics for motor vehicle deaths for the time period surrounding 9/11, as I'd expect them to be higher since nobody could fly for two days and many more people ended up on the road -- plus even more people were irrationally scared off of flying and ended up driving for weeks, or months, afterwards).
(Also I see that the total motor vehicle death toll for 2001 was lower than both 2000 AND 2002.)
What would be more interesting would be to see if you could correlate the increase in highway deaths to the costly and intrusive security theatre that the US has indulged in since then with a proportionate drop in flying, since if someone drives rather than flies, they are statistically more likely to be hurt (air travel is still has the lowest fatalities-per-passenger-mile-traveled) and compare THAT increased number to the 9/11 death toll (and then compare that number to the costs spent on security theatre, essentially calculating how much the US is spending per death to kill more of its citizens).
I'm not trying to disagree with you, I think it is high time the western world got over this stupid obsession. However in the long run, facts will beat hyperbole.
Update:
Worldwide, not US, but point taken.My response:
Wikipedia again: It is often reported that air travel is the safest in terms of deaths per passenger mile. The National Transportation Safety Board (2006) reports 1.3 deaths per hundred million vehicle miles for travel by car, and 1.7 deaths per hundred million vehicle miles for travel by air. These are not passenger miles. If an airplane has 100 passengers, then the passenger miles are 100 times higher. The number of deaths per passenger mile on commercial airlines in the United States between 1995 and 2000 is about 3 deaths per 10 billion passenger miles.
Yahoo! Answers, quoting WebMD: There are about 56 million deaths each year worldwide. About 1.7 million are the result of traffic accidents. That would mean the percent of deaths around the world annually as a result of traffic accidents is about 3%.
Assuming these figures are correct, then that gives an average daily death toll of motor vehicles as 4657 (call it 4700). So world wide, your argument probably holds.
SkyscraperCity: The Geneva-based organization said 1,292 people died in plane crashes in 2006 -- a drop of 11 percent on the previous year.
It occurs to me that neither value can seriously be compared unless we see the passenger-mile-traveled for both types of transport.
But I think I'm beating a dead horse here, so I'm off.
2011-08-12
Ablation
Hi folks
Time for your infrequent update.
First off, the bad news. We have received confirmation that the three lymph nodes taken by the surgeon during the procedure have all tested positive for cancer cells. This is apparently not uncommon with this type of cancer, and doesn't actually change the immediate future.
The better news.
We have also received the schedule for the next set of procedures. The first step is a radiation uptake test, where they inject a small amount of radioactive iodine in me and then a day later measure my neck for how much gets absorbed. The purpose of this is to detect "atopic" thyroid tissue, ie thyroid growths outside of the "normal" thyroid. This would be a rare occurrence, but if positive would require us to stop this procedure and re-engage with the surgeon to have these removed.
Assuming I pass this, a week later I'll get the "ablation" treatment. This is a large dose of radioactive iodine intended to kill any small clusters of thyroid tissue still in my system.
To prepare for this I have to stop my thyroid medication starting the beginning of September and go on the low-iodine (effectively, low-salt) diet. Once I go off the medication I won't be permitted to drive and will have all kinds of side effects.
For the five days following the ablation I will be literally radioactive and will have to be relatively isolated. Although the risk to other people is low, the doctors want me to keep away from people in general and from children in particular.
After the ablation I will get a full body scan, which is where they feed me into a machine and try to decide if any of the mysterious dark spots are more cancer. This is probably where we'll get a feel for the mid-term prognosis -- if the cancer has been removed and we're waiting for re-occurrence, or if it won't come back and I'll have beaten it.
So during four of those five weeks I'll be on effectively a no-salt diet. If you have ideas about what might be edible without any salt (this pamphlet here: http://www.thyroidcancercanada.org/userfiles/files/LID_pamphlet_PDF.pdf illustrates what the restrictions are) I would like to hear them -- even if my finicky food eating habits make this might be even harder.
It is expected that I won't be able to work due to the side effects of not taking the thyroid medication during most of this procedure which will last about five weeks -- two weeks to prepare, a week between the uptake test and the ablation, then two weeks to recover. I'm working with my employer to structure things so that if I can be productive, I will, but without there being visible dependencies on what I am doing. Right now my return-to-work target date is October 10th.
Thanks everyone for your kind words of support through this, and I hope we'll only have better news as we proceed.
Time for your infrequent update.
First off, the bad news. We have received confirmation that the three lymph nodes taken by the surgeon during the procedure have all tested positive for cancer cells. This is apparently not uncommon with this type of cancer, and doesn't actually change the immediate future.
The better news.
We have also received the schedule for the next set of procedures. The first step is a radiation uptake test, where they inject a small amount of radioactive iodine in me and then a day later measure my neck for how much gets absorbed. The purpose of this is to detect "atopic" thyroid tissue, ie thyroid growths outside of the "normal" thyroid. This would be a rare occurrence, but if positive would require us to stop this procedure and re-engage with the surgeon to have these removed.
Assuming I pass this, a week later I'll get the "ablation" treatment. This is a large dose of radioactive iodine intended to kill any small clusters of thyroid tissue still in my system.
To prepare for this I have to stop my thyroid medication starting the beginning of September and go on the low-iodine (effectively, low-salt) diet. Once I go off the medication I won't be permitted to drive and will have all kinds of side effects.
For the five days following the ablation I will be literally radioactive and will have to be relatively isolated. Although the risk to other people is low, the doctors want me to keep away from people in general and from children in particular.
After the ablation I will get a full body scan, which is where they feed me into a machine and try to decide if any of the mysterious dark spots are more cancer. This is probably where we'll get a feel for the mid-term prognosis -- if the cancer has been removed and we're waiting for re-occurrence, or if it won't come back and I'll have beaten it.
So during four of those five weeks I'll be on effectively a no-salt diet. If you have ideas about what might be edible without any salt (this pamphlet here: http://www.thyroidcancercanada.org/userfiles/files/LID_pamphlet_PDF.pdf illustrates what the restrictions are) I would like to hear them -- even if my finicky food eating habits make this might be even harder.
It is expected that I won't be able to work due to the side effects of not taking the thyroid medication during most of this procedure which will last about five weeks -- two weeks to prepare, a week between the uptake test and the ablation, then two weeks to recover. I'm working with my employer to structure things so that if I can be productive, I will, but without there being visible dependencies on what I am doing. Right now my return-to-work target date is October 10th.
Thanks everyone for your kind words of support through this, and I hope we'll only have better news as we proceed.
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