Sent: Monday, October 18, 1999 9:21 PM Subject: BMT update, T-3 Hi Gang, I just became internet enabled today. This is my fourth day in the hospital. The T-3 in the subject line refers to days relative to my transplant day, this Thursday. That'st T+0. It is also traditional amongst us folks to declare this a second birthday. I just found out that this is also Marguerite Kelley's birthday, and she is one of my compatible whole blood donor volunteers at NREL. Take her out for a nice lunch. I will join you next year. I have about 7 pages of notes and ideas on my previous 3 days. I will include this in later messages. This includes what I have gone through, descriptions of where I am living, the people taking care of me, my rapidly developing list of recommended movies to watch during cancer therapy (maybe hospital stays in general), trivia questions, bad jokes, my advice column, and anything else I can come up with to pass the time and entertain all you out there. If this gets any more involved I might have to get an editor. It has been suggested that I sell advertising space. However, in the spirit of the quintiscessential?? magazine of my youth, Mad Magazine ( What me worry?) This will be done solely as a public service. (0 cents, Cheap?) Let me tell you about today. The chemo drugs have hit at my blood cell counts, and they decided last night that I needed to get my first transfusions today. This is a little sooner than I expected, but the doctor said it was not unusual. This beat most of my volunteer donors to the punch, so my first unit was from an unknown volunteer with B neg. I am presently getting my second unit from an NREL donor, who I think is David Young. Please sign the yellow directed donor tags legibly so I know who you are. This blood is O neg. Thanks Dave. Please excuse me. They have me on Lasix, a diuretic. I will be back shortly. I guess I could have said that nature called, but It's not clear that nature is exactly what is doing the calling right now. A slightly gross aside for the old time SERI people. I haven't seen the color and volume of what just came out of me since the Twofer's nights at Lanes on West Colfax. I went in for total body irradiation (TBI) this morning at 7:30 and again at 1:30 this PM. The strategy here is to kill of any stem cells that may be resistant to the massive Cytoxan load I got on Friday and Saturday. Basically hitting them from two completely different directions. I've described this before, but briefly for the new people. They put me in a chair enclosed by plexiglass, and fill up the remaining space with white rice in zip loc bags. The rice apparently absorbs the radiation at the same rate as my tissue, and this insures an even dosage over my body. I am in the beam of a linear accelerator that produces high energy electrons. These hit a material, the target, that releases x-rays with a relatively wide band width and a top energy of 15 MEV. They zap me for 9 minutes on my left side, and 9 more on the right. The analogies with meat, pop tarts, popcorn, anything microwavable, etc., abound. You sit still and let it happen. IT's pretty weird. The accelerator is right out of Star Wars, but the box they put you in is right out of Ace Hardware. I sure hope they really know what they are doing. The facility is run by an actual physicist with a sense of humor. I as him how long he has been doing this, and he said since he got out of jail. (Actually 18 years). In the afternoon session I asked him how much energy, meaning Watts or ergs, I was getting, and he didn't know. I then asked him again how long it has been since he got out of jail. Send me more questions to stump this guy. He said nobody ever asked him that question before in the previous 18 years. There really is not much to do when you get your dose. They said to bring CD's to listen to. My first thought was the Nutcracker by Stravinsky (it's almost that time of year), but we apparently didn't bring it from home. I picked out the Grateful Dead American Beauty and Abbey Road by the ? If you can't answer that one, you need more pop music education. I picked these albums because they have particular meaning to the history of my life, and I really like the songs. An amazing thing happened. The lyrics had amazing connections to radiation, my situation, my physics background, etc. I am really thinging of putting together a CD for these guys to play to people without music: Music to get zapped by (think of something better) . The first words on the Dead album, Box of rain, are: "If my words did glow with the gold of sunshine." What a head trip. Later on, Ripple reminded me of the ripple box experiments you do in high school physic to understand how was work. This will mean something to some of you. The radiation stopped in the middle of Right when the last song played, Till the Morning Comes. The line they sang was "let the shadows come, it will do you fine." The Dead never meant more to me. The second unit of blood just ended, and I have been disconnected from my constant companion, the IV pump cart. When I came in here they said that people often named their carts. These things are constant companions for my whole stay in the hospital. Anyway, naming this steel and plastic tower seemed pretty dumb, but the idea is becoming more appealing. Harvey comes to mind (ask somebody if that doesn't mean anything to you). Any other other bright ideas? You may have noticed that this is strictly stream of consciousness, more or less in as real time as my typing allows, as it comes out of my head. My apologies to James Joyce. The first Beatles song was Come Together. It had the line: "One thing I can tell you is you got to be free." This seemed to be real appropriate. Later, I may have come up with my one and only improvement on a Lennon/McCartney. They said: "Hold you in his armchair, you can feel his disease. " which isn't bad. I came up with Maybe, he "Hold you in his armchair, he just do what he please." Which steals words from earlier in the song. Enough songwriting, certainly not one of my strong points. Maxwell's Silver Hammer may have been a mistake. Oh Darlin' had :"Believe me when I tell you I'll never do you no harm". No explanation needed, but I never thought to a physicist before as Darlin'! Octopus's Garden. The whole song. I am an certified advance open water diver. Got my basic certification on the Great Barrier Reef in Australia in 1986. This was a lifelong dream, and was actually made possible by Ronald Reagan, go Dutch. I got riffed from SERI in February, 1986, the last three of the remaining 10 or so people in the original buildings research area. I figured, what the hell. I was single, had money, health and time. I went on a trip to Tahiti (don't do it unless you have a lot of money and speak real good French), New Zealand (the best place I've ever been, Australia(California in the '50s) and Fiji. Had to get back to San Francisco to be best man in a wedding. Who knows, I might still be out there somewhere without that. I did a lot of recreational diving in California, Florida and the Caribbean. Even got an SBIR grant to develop an underwater video image processing system for the National Marine Fisheries Service. Had to do the open water testing in the Keys. Sort of like my version of a space shot. I got the camera in focus, an iterative, manual process, exactly when the funding people stepped on our boat. As far as I know, I am likely the only person to receive federal funds to develop oceanographic equipment in Colorado. Tested the thing at the pool at the YMCA in Boulder. It was hard not getting real wet on my last trip to Maui in September. Snorkeled around on the surface, but kept real close to a good, dependable oxygen supply. Did see some big, big squid, but couldn't dive down to get a closer look. Now, back to the song. Just imagine what I though when I heard this, with a constellation class phaser pointed at me on kill. I'd like to be under the sea, in an octupus's garden in the shade He'd let us in knows hwere been in his octopus's garden in the sea Id ask my friends to come and see my octopuses garden with me We would be warm below the storm in our little hideaway beneath the waves Resting our head on the sea bed in an octopus's garden near a cave We would sing and dance around because we know we can't be found We would shout and swim about the coral that lies beneath the waves Oh what joy for every girl and boy knowing their happy and their safe We would be so happy you and me, no one there to tell us what to do The last two lines got me crying. Not bad, but it really hit me. By the way, some of these words may be wrong, because I am typing from the audio, and my typing is not as fast or as accurate as it could be. This song is distinctive because, I believe, it was written and lead sung by Ringo. His were usually just the throwaway stuff on the Beatles ablums. I always considered him about the luckiest person in the world, with Dan Quail coming in somewhat lower. There was a recent Simpson's rerun where Ringo replies to a fan letter that Marge sent when she was a teenager, and he was almost a Beatle. Maybe I should write him. Way to go Mr. Starkey. She's so heavy. Oh come on. Deuterium oxide is too cheap a shot. Ask a physicist. I had planned on having Here Comes the Sun as the final number, but they finished early. That'll happen tomorrow at about 7:30 AM. I will continue this sort of thing as long as I am able. Let's here from you out there. Dave By the way, I did get a response on my music list from an earlier email that some of you got. My email lists are not fully transferred to the notebook I have here. Anyway, Bernie Sikorski suggested Purple Haze by Jimi Hendryx?? What an obvious choice. I saw him in 1968 in Chicago. Some of my favorite music of all time. Just spent time with friends with teenagers. Hendryx is still tops on the list of these guys. Maybe our generation did produce a truly classical music form. Led Zeppelin, Opus 4!! To top it off, and to close the cicle, Bernie wrote this while on a business trip to Oak Ridge National Lab. Talk to you soon.