Sent: Friday, October 29, 1999 2:48 AM
Subject: T+8, early morning

Hello again,

First, open up the attached file.  I decided to explore a whole different 
part of myself.  Hope you get a kick out of it.  By the way, only one of us 
has their real hair.

If you are new, check out my web page:  http://www.goss.com/david/

There are new pictures, and my blood counts and walking distances are covered 
in the graphs.  By the way, I finished my first 10K cumulative distance last 
night.  Can't know for sure, but this may turn into one of the long standing 
records in all of sport, ala Lou Gehrig or Jesse Owens.  

The last two days have seen different drugs, with their resulting side 
effects.  One of thes has kept me real drowsy, so it has been hard to do much 
typing.  I am more or less back to normal now, and will provide a brief 
update.

Yesterday was my one week birthday, and also potentially my half-way point in 
here.  Release could be in two weeks, Nov. 11, if things go well and my blood 
counts are high enough.

Hair loss has taken on titanic proportions.  The shower floor today looks 
like the Russian front, scorched earth, largest tank battles of all time 
(Kurst), you get the idea.  Send the Propecia.  

People have asked where my ideas and information come from.  Well, apart from 
the random infusion of things from music, movies and TV that I have on here, 
everything else comes from my head.  I have used no references and I don't 
use the web.  For you Chicagoans, I had a Married with Children episode 
running in the background, and Ernie Banks, our childhood hero 
shortstop/first baseman for the Cubs came on.  This could easily spark ideas 
that will show up later.

I had some strange cramps two nights ago.  They found on the next blood test 
the my blood levels of Cyclosporine were too high.  They decreased the dosage 
and the cramps and the finger shakes have disappeared.

I had been having a particular problem with Robbie because of a design flaw.  
Worked up a suitable prototype out of locally available material, and may 
have a patentable idea, at least a major design improvement from the 
patient's point of view.

I received a neat computer game, The Curse of Monkey Island, from the son of 
my oldest friend.  The son is a teenager.  His goal in life is to develop 
computer games.  He may or may not remember this.  A few years ago he proudly 
showed my one of the games that he developed in Visual Basic, my favorite.  
It was a shoot-em-down, space aliens sort of affair.  He showed me his 
software and I noticed that he had a separate procedure for each target, I 
think they were insects.  I told him about arrays, seeming to me that they 
were a novel concept.  Now he is a primo computer hack, and when he gets to 
talking about his stuff, I lose track of what he is saying.  

Yesterday morning (Wednesday) my white cell count showed a small, but 
significant increase from the noise around 0. Everybody assured me that this 
had to be measurement error, and that the real cells could not appear so 
quickly.  I conjectured that maybe something unusual happened because of the 
too hight dosage of cyclosporine.  I also noticed that 2 out of 3 of my mouth 
sores had begun to heal, and a nurse had told me that this would likely be 
the first sign of the cell counts coming back.  Amazingly, the body, 
realizing that getting food is the first priority, seems to heal the mouth 
first, even under conditions that are likely never encountered in Nature.  
Well, this morning's counts were back in the 0 noise, so it probably was 
measurement error.  Damn.

In another major development, I actually began reading a book today, Hocus 
Poces by Kurt Vonnegut, a favorite author of mine.  The book was given to me 
by my brother Mike.  Anyway, and don't be grossed out by this,  I have begun 
reading while sitting on the toilet.  People have asked where I got such a 
wide range of knowledge, and frankly, a lifetime of this activity does have 
it's benefits.  Ask Norm Weaver for a related story on this.

A joke submitted by a reader:

The History of Medicine

2000 B.C. - Here, eat this root

1000 A.D. - That root is heathen. Here, say this prayer.

1850 A.D. - That prayer is superstition. Here, drink this potion.

1940 A.D. - That potion is snake oil. Here, swallow this pill.

1985 A.D. - That pill is ineffective. Here, take this antibiotic.

2000 A.D. - That antibiotic doesn't work anymore. Here, eat this root.

Finally, I spoke to several of you privately about my thought process on 
Thursday night/Friday Morning.  I basically thought that I was so focussed 
that I thought it might be like Einstein and Mozart were all the time.  
Instead I spent the time in what I called stream of consciousness typing.  
Anyway, I ran across this on the web, and some of you might find it 
interesting.

Harvey, MD, of Weston, Missouri. Harvey was the pathologist at Princeton 
Hospital in New Jersey who performed the autopsy when Einstein died in 1955.
Why the brain was preserved at all is not clear; the rest of the body was 
cremated shortly after death. One biographer says Einstein wanted it to be 
used for research; the executor of his estate denies this, and says the 
decision to preserve it was made by his son. At any rate, plans to examine 
the brain never really got off the ground. One of Harvey's associates blabbed 
prematurely to the press and the ensuing publicity antagonized the family. 
Then Harvey and other researchers couldn't agree on the best way to proceed 
with the dissection. The brain eventually did get sliced up (it's kept in 
several bottles today), but after that things just sort of fizzled out. 
Despite repeated promises, neither Harvey nor any of the other original 
investigators has published anything about the brain to date.
The whole episode might have been a complete waste of time except for the 
efforts of two neuroanatomists at UC-Berkeley, Marian Diamond and Arnold 
Scheibel. Several years ago they learned of the brain's existence and 
persuaded Harvey to send them some samples. Diamond had done earlier research 
in which she found that rats who were raised in an intellectually stimulating 
environment (for a rat) had larger than average brains, and she was curious 
to see if something similar occurred in humans. Sure enough, she and Scheibel 
found that one portion of Einstein's brain contained significantly more 
"glial" cells than a sampling of ordinary brains. (Glial cells perform 
various support functions for the neurons, which do the brain's thinking.) 
Ergo, it's possible that if you use your head more, your brain becomes more 
developed. That may not sound like a real breakthrough, but it beats what 
anybody else has come up with.

Of course it is also possible that all the chemo and x-rays simply melted 
some new pathways in my neurons.

See you later,

Dave