What did we want in a home? The CC&R's for the property said that it had to be a minimum of 2500 square feet and had to have at least a 3 car garage. After that it was completely up to us.
We called some local architects, they wanted around $15,000 to design a new custom home. What did we want above and beyond what we already had? She wanted a craft room, I wanted the house to have a whole house fan. My Father built one into our house when I was a kid and I knew that a whole house fan was a great way to bring the temperature of a house down with the cool evenings around here. And of course I wanted a big deck for a meal, a snack or just a snooze in the hammock.
In the end we picked a local builder and modified plans that they already had on their website. Plans in place and a down payment made to the builder we were ready to build, right? Not so fast, first it was off to the bank for a construction loan.
A construction loan is sort of like a mortgage, but for new construction. As the builder completes a stage of the build and needs more money to proceed he makes a draw on the loan. The bank sends an inspector to make sure that progress claimed has actually been made and if everything passes inspection the bank releases money to the builder. At the end of the build the construction loan turns into a 30 year mortgage.
How does one get a construction loan? Simple, you just have to go to a bank and submit to a 3 month long financial colonoscopy. Most every day the bank would send me an email detailing what financial information or documentation they required and each day I'd retrieve whatever personal financial information they requested, package it as a PDF and send it back and await the next request. After 3 months of this our construction loan was approved, yay!
Now we're ready to break ground and build, right? Not so fast, now the City's Building Department has to get involved and approve the plans because no construction can take place without a building permit. We were told that between Covid and a crush of new construction the City's Building Department was seriously backed up. Eventually the City wanted some minor changes and they also has a bizarre proposal from the Fire Department that we kill the view and build our home close to the street and build a road with a traffic circle on the hillside view part of the property big enough so that they could turn around a fire engine. That's kind of above and beyond our civic duty. We said no.
After 3 months stuck in building permit purgatory the City gave us our permits and we were ready to break ground and build, right? Not so fast, the builder said that due to inflation and supply chain snafus he was unable to get construction supplies or labor. Concrete was being rationed and he couldn't get any, he said. Could we pick our garage door now? That's because it could take a year to obtain one. He also suggested that we start shopping for appliances immediately as they were nearly un-obtainable. I started to get the feeling that we were building a dacha in the Soviet Union.
We have a nice house in a nice neighborhood. But some of our neighbors got homesick and sold their homes and went back where they came from.
The neighborhood changed further when Covid arrived. This was when people started to disinfect their groceries and Amazon deliveries. People were afraid. I was afraid. Interaction among neighbors on the street was reduced to awkward conversations at the mail kiosk when people stood 20' apart and loudly asked how each other were coping with the threat of the virus and the isolation of the defacto lockdowns (there were no official government mandated lockdowns here). More than once I concluded these conversations with, "OK, see you next year!" I was only half joking. We had a nice house but eventually whatever cohesiveness this neighborhood had succumbed to Covid.
Meanwhile, Covid was no joke. Several people in this neighborhood got it and had long hospital stays and longer recoveries. One of my wife's friends died.
I began to think that I was getting a preview of our later years, when we will further bow to Father Time and have slowed down even more. What if Covid never stopped and we had to spend much of time self confined? Wouldn't it be nice to live in a house to prepare for that time? We looked at a few homes about 20 miles away, many had sewer grinder pumps (meaning no connection to city sewer), no natural gas connection or no cell signal.
And then this piece of land became available.
Standing on the land we had just purchased. Click here for larger picture
It was 3 blocks from where we were living
It had a view. The homes across the street are restricted from building up by their HOA.
Nearly an acre so we'll have plenty of lebensraum from neighbors and street traffic.
Had municipal water and sewer, high speed Internet access and natural gas hookups.
But that was only the beginning. In early 2021 the economy was still wobbly. To sell or to build? We spent a few months waiting to see what would happen and finally decided to build a new home on the land. First we had to figure out what kind of home we wanted. And then we had to find someone to build it.
I knew that whatever we build we'd need to have a deck and big windows in order to capitalize on views like this. If I'm going to spend a great deal of time as a homebody because of age or infirmity I want something better to look at than Netflix or Prime video.
Click here for larger picture and to see the snow capped peaks
Most people aren't directly touched by Obamacare. They get their health insurance through their employer, Cobra, Medicare or for veterans Tricare. Health insurance is mandatory now. The only health insurance that my wife can purchase is Obamacare on the Federal Exchange and at $1378 per month for their Silver plan it's unaffordable. There's no competition, take it but under IRS penalty you'd better not leave it. This is not a political fight for us, it's fixed income survival. Unchecked Obamacare will kill us. Best case: Obamacare cripples us.
Figuring 15% to 50% a year in premium increases we could be out a quarter of a million dollars (possibly more) by the time my wife becomes Medicare eligible in 8 years. And that's just for the mandatory insurance. Because Obamacare includes big deductibles as standard equipment actual health care for most things not catastrophic is an additional cost. I try to realize that Obamacare is working for some people but that's only at the expense of others. There are winners and losers with every government program and in this one we're big losers. I'm angry at the democrats for creating this nightmare for us and I'm angry at the republicans for teasing repeatedly that they'll modify or gut it and then not doing squat. Here's my Senator John McCain when he was running for reelection last summer:
Maverick my ass. He told us what we wanted to hear. Once he was reelected (I regret my vote for him) all of that was forgotten. I want Obamacare done away with, it sits over our heads like a sharp sword. I feel like a chump because I carefully planned and saved for retirement and in doing so set us up for this while others who pissed their money away are getting cheap or free rides. We're the broken eggs in someone else's omelette.
The Feds pay during Obamacare open enrollment time for something called Navigators. We made an appointment at the local hospital to see one and during our meeting quickly established what I already knew, their expensive threadbare and mandatory insurance was absolutely unaffordable. She told us that it was mandatory, I refused and only half in jest I invited her to visit me in Leavenworth. Not because I hate the government but because their health insurance in addition to my Medicare plus supplements would exceed $20,000 for 2018 and will only go up. She said that she understood and told us that most people who come in for these meetings who don't get a subsidized ride leave angry and without buying insurance on the federal marketplace. The upshot is that 2 weeks after the meeting with the navigator where we turned down their insurance we got a bill for $1140 from Blue Cross of AZ for a month of Obamacare. I guess it really is mandatory. I refuse to pay. Leavenworth here we come!
So what about that subsidy that we don't qualify for? Maybe we're rich and deserve to pay full freight. Hey man, no tax cuts or subsidies for the rich! Here's how the subsidy works for 2 people. The eligibility is figured using your gross income, the figure before all the common deductions for stock losses, mortgage interest, medical bills, personal exemption and state and local taxes etc. Have a gross income of $65,000 or less a year? Good news, you get a giant subsidy! Have a million dollars in the bank? You still get the subsidy. Have a gross income of $65,001? Nothing in the bank? No subsidy for you! That's it, $65k gross is the subsidy limit for 2018, that's why exceeding it is referred to as going over the subsidy cliff. Because of my pension and the bull stock market we're just slightly on the wrong side of the subsidy cliff. I'd rather be rich but over the course of 8 years this is guaranteed to make us poor, to possibly force us out of our home and to leave us with nothing but Social Security and cat food.
Not buying insurance on their marketplace opens us up to a fine of 2.5% of our income from the IRS. But there are ways around that. I have to submit paperwork to the IRS documenting that their insurance will cost us in excess of $6000. We've also joined the Christian Healthcare Ministries, by doing so we should get a religious exemption. Thank you Jesus.
OK, so now what? I had a 3 hour phone conversation with an old friend, he's retired and plays with the tax code and Obamacare just for kicks. He told me that due to quirks in Obamacare's ham handed regulations and the way AZ handles them Arizona is probably the worst state for Obamacare. He told me that in AZ there were no alternatives to the Federal Health Insurance Marketplace.
I even broached the subject of divorce with my wife. If we were no longer married she could get any job and get a big subsidy and our retirement funds would remain intact. We'd see a lawyer first so that nothing would change other than the ripping up of the marriage certificate. I've read of couples in our situation who have done this. She wouldn't hear of it. She is once again looking for work. It's slim employment pickens here but supposedly the economy is better now and if she hits the jackpot and gets a job with employer health insurance we can forestall the erosion of retirement assets. Meanwhile, she's making challah at $6 a loaf. Obamacare Silver goes for $1378 a month here so that means that for 2018 the break even point is 230 challahs per month.
A neighbor my wife's age who just quit her job and is facing the same problem as we are called and said that she had answered some junk mail from a salesman who said that he had a way around Obamacare. The salesman was to come to their house to make his pitch, wanna come over and listen? I listened. It's flimsy and legal for them to sell but possibly illegal for us to buy. It's from a company I've never heard of that's owned by Kemper Insurance. They use the Christian Healthcare Ministries as a fig leaf of legality. Thank you Jesus, after a second meeting I bought the questionable insurance because it was a little more than 1/3 the price of Obamacare silver and I felt like I had my back to the wall.
I'm afraid of testing this insurance (it kicks in Dec 1). I'm afraid of the IRS. I'm afraid that the Republicans won't repeal or gut this financial cancer upon us and I'm afraid that the Democrats will again scream that to alter it in the slightest is heartless, cruel and will mean that innocent people will die. They're both full of crap. We're just collateral damage.
This letter recently arrived in the US Mail. Considering all of the radiation side effects I've had since the seed implant procedure on 2/29 I wonder if I'll receive another letter when the radiation declines by the first half life.
I've been home from surgery for a week and recovery hasn't been as uneventful as the pre-surgery handout from my urologist promised.
So now I've met the O/R and know that I never want to go back. I found an O/R to be quite an assembly line. When I was doing all of my paperwork in the waiting room prior to the big event there was a woman with a cane bitching to staff and anybody who would listen about her eye and what some distant relative nurse she found on Facebook told her to tell the doctors that they must do. When I regained consciousnessafter my procedure one of the first things I heard was the same woman, only a partition curtain away, telling the doctors in the O/R what some distant relative nurse she found on Facebook told her that they must do. I met the urologist and oncologist who worked on me prior to my going into the O/R but I haven't seen them since.
I've seen what the Foley catheter looks like installed on/in me and unfortunately it's something that can't ever be unseen, it looked like someone had successfully grafted my Johnson to a garden hose connector ("connection adapter", shown below minus the internal parts that snake into the bladder), plumbing fit for Frankenstein. I knew beforehand that the Foley catheter was going to be part of the show and I chose willful ignorance prior to the procedure and being whacked out on anesthesia during since there was no way I could prevent its use. I knew that such a device existed but had never seen one because I don't hang out in hospitals or look at kinky plumbing prØn.
Once implanted and radioactive I was uncoupled from the hospital's electronics and plumbing I was placed into a wheelchair and sent out of the hospital with a single pain pill, a handout describing what I should do to for a successful recovery and a post card where I could rate my experience and express my customer service concerns to the hospital. All of the hospital staff that I interacted with were courteous, pleasant and polite but there was no box that I could check that said, "please don't attach hospital equipment to my wiener", so I threw the postcard away.
My recovery is coming along more slowly than I was led to believe it would. Other than having prostate cancer I'm in fairly good health so I feel for any guy who isn't in good health and has to withstand this kind of well intentioned abuse. I quickly came to feel as if someone had repeatedly stomped my genital area with hobnailed boots. I had to pee frequently but couldn't produce and I found that incredibly frustrating and frightening. I'd sit like a girl for 20 minutes trying to fight overwhelmingly unpleasant sensations as I tried to start the flow of the river from my yellow headwaters. Eleanor got used to me closing the bathroom door behind me and having sessions of grunting and loud cursing. In retirement a man needs to keep his mind working so I've taken to cursing in Russian (link NSFW!) and да (yes), I'm also teaching myself the Cyrillic alphabet. ебаTь!
I'm leaving the house on a daily basis now and advance scouting for bathrooms wherever I go because I never know when I'm going to suddenly be in need of relief. At night I awake and roll out of bed every hour and a half to urinate, or attempt to, and I find this incredibly annoying (although not as annoying as having an advanced cancer). My hospital handout says that this sleep disturbing side effect of my treatment can linger for months.
Next, many physical journeys by aircraft, automobiles and truck will culminate in the new home that awaits us as I work toward living happily ever after and cancer free.
My cancer now has a 2nd glowing sole print on its ass. I reported to the hospital bright and early and allowed them to sedate me and then to somehow implant radioactivity on the cancerous areas of my prostate gland. I say somehow because I encouraged them to use enough anesthesia to bomb me back to the stone age. I wasn't aware of what they did or how they did it.
Next stop: the O/R where cancer gets the 2nd of a radioactive 1,2 punch
But when they were done I sure knew. While I was off pounding cold ones with Fred and Barney I had a Foley catheterinstalled. Modesty prevents me from relating exactly what that is, where they stuck it or what it looked like when properly installed so click on the link (SFW) and all will be revealed. When I woke up I was in pain all over. My throat hurt because they had stuck some kind of breathing apparatus down in there. My insides hurt where my new radioactive seeds, the ones that I'll take to my grave, now live. My wiener hurt and my bladder was screaming that I had to pee like it was filled with jellied fire. Not knowing where I was and not quite conscious I think that I tried to get up with the intention of finding a men's room. But I still had tubes in me and wired sensors on me, some of which I'm told that I ripped out. Oh, and the Foley catheter was still properly plumbed. My struggle is what the nurse told me caused the big blood stain on the bed. The nurse warned me that when he removed Mr. Foley's catheter it would be painful and boy was he ever right. I screamed from the intense burning pain in a very personal place where I had never felt pain before. They sent me home wearing a maxi-pad. When I got home I motored around my house under my own power. I'm uncomfortable and when I urinate it burns like I'm peeing Drano but the doctors said that I should feel better in a few days. I'm carrying enough internal radiation to arouse the TSA or ICE from their slumber but I have a card attesting to my nuclear non-proliferation status to show them at the airport or the Canadian border. My post-op instructions say to not allow little children to sit on my lap due to radiation and to take it easy for a few weeks. My urologist says that if the scan I'm to receive shortly shows the seeds taking root in the right place I'm good to go, to move to our new home and to live out the rest of my days happily ever after.
Just prior to the procedure to seed my prostate gland with radiation I can carry around I received a pre game PSA test. A score of 4 or lower is considered normal. I was sent to a urologist with a score of 8, which grew to an 11.
Below is proof that 5 weeks of a daily radiation blast and some hormones get results, I now have the PSA of a normal guy.
In order to keep the PSA of a normal guy I'll need to get some more radiation, this time implanted on the prostate glad itself. I'm in the on deck circle for that right now.
Assuming that everything goes according to plan with my upcoming brachytherapy here are 2 pictures of our recently completed house along with a still shot from a webcam overlooking the development.
Although I'm still left with the side effects of 5 weeks of radiation Godzilla is safely back in his cage. Soon I will get internal radiation and then hopefully be on my way to beating cancer and selling our house.
Leap year comes once but every 4 years and every 4 years I do a double take when I look at a calendar and see February 29th. I've did a double take after I found out that my next step in prostate cancer treatment, seeding the prostate gland with little bits of a radioactive substance, was scheduled for the morning of February 29th. So imagine my surprise when I received an email from the builder of our new house in Arizona saying that they'd like us to come on down for the closing on our house to trade a large sum of cash for title and keys on February 29th. What are the odds?
By the time you read this I'll be move in ready!
The builder broke ground the day I received my cancer diagnosis. So in the race to see whether I'd beat cancer first or have to cough up money for a house I can't move into until I beat cancer is over, the house won. Needless to say I can't hand over money in Arizona while I'm sedated and having an invasive medical procedure performed on me in Seattle so my wife called the builder and sweet talked them into a no cost extension, because moving into a new house is a really big deal but becoming cancer free is job #1 prime directive now. Only after recovery can I seriously think about job #2: paying for the new house, moving to the new house and selling the old house. New house closing date is now March 15, the oncologist says I should be roadworthy by then. I'm in the home stretch of daily radiation treatments and can't wait to hit the 5 week finish line. The most annoying radiation side effect so far has been on my bladder. Driven crazy by radiation it's in perpetual freakout mode, always alerting me that it's full and ready to burst. "I gotta go!!!!!", Right NOW! There are no half measures, no stalling, no putting it off for the next rest area on the freeway. It's always seems like a matter of desperation. I sometimes awake every hour during the night to stumble to the bathroom and pee and man, is that annoying. My oncologist says that this should diminish when the daily radiation stops, only to pick up again in March when radiation will be permanently installed in the prostate gland itself. It should permanentlydiminish as the radiation half life decays the radiation away, kills the cancer and the seeds become inert. Those inert seeds will go to the grave with me. So how is this seed installation done? What happens after the radioactive seeds are implanted? If you're curious click here and read,
WHAT TO EXPECT FROM A SEED IMPLANT: THE FIRST TWELVE MONTHS
I received that in the US mail and it was most likely written by my oncologist as his name is first on the masthead. I had been under the impression that they would place these radioactive seeds in my prostate gland through my back door just as the urologist previously biopsied it but this isn't so.
Following anesthesia, thin needles containing radioactive seeds
are precisely placed under ultrasound guidance through the skin between the
scrotum and rectum and into the prostate.
Yow! That sounds like a frightening thing to let strangers do in a very tender place. Anesthesia isn't what I thought it would be either:
The first choice is a spinal anesthetic where
a thin needle is inserted in the lower back and a Novocaine-like medication is
injected. With spinal anesthesia, patients are temporarily numb from the waist
down and will not feel any of the needles being placed. In addition to the
spinal anesthetic, patients commonly receive a sedative intravenously so that
they are more relaxed and often sleep through the procedure. The spinal
anesthesia is the most frequent choice of patients and the one that we usually
recommend whenever possible.
The second choice is a light general anesthetic so
the patient is completely “out.” This works well but patients are often groggy
for some time after the procedure. The anesthesiologist will review the details
including both pros and cons of these two approaches. Sometimes the type of
anesthetic is determined by the patient’s overall medical condition; other
times it is a choice for the patient to make.
Make mine choice #2, light general anesthetic. I don't want to experience the lower half of my body turn numb while I watch people insert things into me. I know that this work needs to be done, wake me when it's over.
I'm into my second week of 5 weeks of daily radiation treatments for prostate cancer. Each morning I take the bus to the Polyclinic on Pill Hill, change into pajama bottoms, lay down and position myself into a plastic cast of my calves and feet and present myself to huge round device above me that looks like something out of a planetarium. Technicians come in to verify my identity by asking for my birthday. Then they pull my pajama bottoms down around my hips so they can find my little freckle tattoos in order to align me properly and hopefully avoid irradiating of any innocent bystander organs. Once alignment is complete the technicians leave the room, close the door and the process begins. I feel nothing and hear little. Other than an occasional click there's no sensation of any kind. When there's music it's been jazz or country. After 10 or 15 minutes a technician comes in and we exchange pleasantries and it's over until the next time. See you tomorrow! I change back into my street clothes, leave the hospital and get back on the bus. That's it? Beating cancer can't be that easy. And it's not. I've been warned that side effects are coming, specifically weakness. And there might be some skin burning. And other more invasive and unpleasant procedures will come after my 5 week course of radiation is complete and my diseased parts have been properly prepped. One side effect that I am experiencing is an unusual flatulence. It doesn't seem to matter what I eat. It starts in the afternoon and continues for most of the night while I sleep, a sort of bubbly and near constant, sometimes painful production of gas. Radiation is administered 5 days a week so when the flatulence faded over the long holiday weekend I suspected the radiation. During my 5 weeks of radiation I get 5 minutes a week to talk to my oncologist so I asked him if the flatulence and radiation were related. He smiled weakly, nodded affirmatively and added, "there's going to be some mucus too". Oh goody, gas and liquids. "Will I get any warning or will it just happen?". He smiled again. "You'll get a warning". It's not much of a warning though. I'm starting to find the whole radiation experience to be just a bit creepy. It's a treatment that I can't hear, see or feel yet I'm starting to experience the side effects. The radiation has inflamed my bladder so I urinate frequently. When I go anywhere my first task is to seek out and note all bathrooms. I can't sleep more than 2 or 3 hours without having to get up to pee. I'm looking forward to a period when I can recover from my treatment and prepare myself for the next much more invasive phase.
The implantation of the gold markers inside of me has been completed. They had me take off my clothes and lay on my side to expose my behind. I thought that I heard the urologist come in and say hello but I don't recall seeing him. But I sure felt what he was doing, it was knuckle bitingly painful, for hours after it felt as if someone had yanked a bath towel made of Brillo through my back door. But by the next day the burning pain had subsided. Bring on the next procedure, of which there will be many.
Perhaps I've been kidding myself. Maybe the last stage was something other than acceptance. Maybe it was denial. Denial of the fact that while mundane daily life goes on around me I've been able to briefly put this looming life challenge out of my head for 2 weeks. I sometimes forget how serious a slow motion terror this is but get shocked back to reality. The other night I was on the phone with a friend and we were discussing rock stars who had died prematurely. I knew that Dan Fogelberg, a moderate star in the 1980's, had died in his 50's but I couldn't remember of what. My friend was near his PC so he looked it up. "Oh no, sorry", he said.
In May 2004, Fogelberg was diagnosed with advanced prostate cancer. After undergoing therapy, he achieved a partial remission. On August 13, 2005, his 54th birthday, he announced the success of his cancer treatments. He said that he had no immediate plans to return to making music but was keeping his options open. However, his cancer returned, and on December 16, 2007, Fogelberg died at the age of 56 at his home in Deer Isle, Maine. His ashes were scattered into the Atlantic Ocean.
The prostate cancer in a man in his 40's or 50's is often much more virulent than the prostate cancer in a man in his 60's. Mine's bad enough but as far as I know I don't have advanced prostate cancer. This is my fight but medical mercenaries help me fight it as I can't run the radiation machine or decide how much radiation is just enough to keep suppress cancer without French frying my insides and I can't reach in somehow and seed my own prostate gland with just the right amount of radioactivity. I'm glad that there are people who do this work because I sure can't. All I can do is report on time, clean and prepared for treatment, to bite down and bear the pain, to be cooperative with the doctors, nurses and techs and to pay the bills after the numbers been filtered, massaged and spit out by the medical/insurance industrial complex.
How much should curing cancer in an individual cost? I'm seeing lots of fancy and expensive equipment overseen by highly trained and talented people who administer fancy sounding tests and drugs to me, surely none of this comes cheap. But the numbers on my itemized bills don't mean much to me as I have no basis to assign a value to the various tests and procedures that I'm being subjected to; in some cases I don't even know what they are or what I'm paying for. The insurance company knocks the numbers down, in some cases substantially, and on the bottom of each bill I'm left with a sum to pay. And I pay that sum and pay it promptly because I'm paying people who say that they have a track record in doing what a few years ago was nearly impossible: saving the lives of people with cancer and that is where the real value is to me.
I'm starting to realize that emotionally for me cancer appears to have stages. The first one was the I'm gonna die stage. It started with the moment of my diagnosis, lasted for 2 weeks and was marked by emotional instability, no sleep and the desire to "get my affairs in order". It was an awful time when I didn't want to do anything or see anybody. There was going to be no further retirement, no new house, no future, no nothing. Cancer and death tinged my every thought.
I'm in the 2nd stage now, acceptance. I have doctors and a plan so I have some confidence that I'm in good hands. Things could be much worse, at least I don't have a gruesome big league cancer like glioblastoma multiforme, or GBM. In this 2nd stage not much has happened. I got a hormone shot and I took some pills and got a mildly invasive back door ultrasound but other than that I've resumed my normal retired life and haven't thought about cancer much. But I sense a gathering treatment storm, I now have so many upcoming medical appointments that I've had to use Google Calendar to track them all. The 3rd active, invasive and radioactive stage is about to get underway. Soon I'm going in for the internal implantation of gold markers. I was told that it's just like a prostate biopsy (!) except with no snapping sounds (the peeling of the prostate is accompanied by snapping sounds as the harvesting instrument does its back door deeds). That means an experience as close to prison rape as I'd like to get, urinating blood and other jarring side effects. Perhaps carrying the gold markers will be something new to explain to airport security screeners if I get x-rayed by the TSA, assuming that I get through all of this and live to fly again.
Soon after I report to the downtown radiation/oncology center for something that on the phone sounded like a simple consultation session. Then an envelope arrived in the mail containing a flyer with an ominous heading that read,
PLANNING APPOINTMENT FOR RADIATION TREATMENT
An excerpt: "A bean bag mold of your hips will be used to position you in the same way each day. A few tiny, pin point tattoos will be placed on your skin. These tattoos will assist in positioning throughout your daily treatments". My first tattoos!
The flyer goes on to instruct me about my sit down bathroom habits (they want daily and on schedule production), what to eat to get the desired solid and gas levels, when to pee and how much pee to leave inside for them. "We would like your bladder to be partially full for your CT and each day when you are treated. Please, urinate 30 minutes before your CT and then each day before your treatment time to empty your bladder. Then drink 8 ounces of water or non caffeinated fluid and do not urinate until after your CT or Tx". I don't even know what a Tx is but for all I know I'll be getting one (or more) daily starting before New Year's Day. Radiation treatments will be daily and last for 5 weeks so hello again daily commute, bring out those lead lined King County Metro buses.
The power of radiation
After all of this will come the 4th stage, one so invasive that anesthesia will be required and when I awake I'll leave sore and with even more radiation. The anesthesia is a good thing, please bomb me back to the stone age if the hands of strangers and their medical tools must enter me there.
Now men have their own unique and manly exam room stirrups
After that the healing can begin and if everything goes according to plan an old home can be sold and a new home purchased and I'll be able to gratefully add cancer survivor to my list of life accomplishments.
I've encountered a major obstacle in my retirement plan of selling our home and moving into our new home presently under construction in Arizona. I've been diagnosed with an aggressive form of prostate cancer. My urologist and oncologist say that it's probably treatable with a triple play of hormones, radiation and something called brachytherapy ("seeds"). One thing is for sure, the house in Arizona is being built and cannot be cancelled, the only way for me to get out of this financial legal responsibility would be for cancer to win and for the builder to sort it all out with my widow and my estate. On the day that I received my cancer diagnosis I also received an email with a picture of the first home site construction activity, the foundation being poured, so now the race is on. This is the sort of health crisis that I've always feared even as I knew it would increase in probability as I aged. It means having for the first time to stick my head deep into the mouth of the medical/insurance lion. When we move to Arizona we will lose my wife's insurance and be cast into the Obamacare cauldron. There have been bright spots though. My GP and urologist say that they found it early. Bone and CT scans show that the cancer has not spread. Right now I feel fine physically, if the doctors hadn't told me I'd never know. My wife is down for the struggle and as long as she's working we both have good insurance. I contacted my surgeon friend in San Diego and he was much more than just supportive, he spoke with my oncologist and asked him the questions that I'd never know to ask. He also checked out the triple play I'm about to undergo with several oncologists and urologists at his hospital, in essence giving me a 2nd and 3rd opinion because when it comes to complex life and death personal medical questions like this WTF do I know? When the house in Arizona is completed the builder will summon me to come with payment. I can have the money to give them if we sell the house here. I can only sell the house here if my treatment is complete and I'm cancer free. So as I said earlier, the race is on. Assuming I'll be cured, will the house be completed first or will I be cancer free first? As of last contact all of the wooden bones of the new house are up and the new home is quickly taking shape down there. Here's my to do list, any one item alone would be a major undertaking:
Beat cancer
Cough up a large sum of money and give it to the builder in Arizona
Sell our old house
Pack all of our belongings and get them to AZ (method to be determined)
Unpack and then move in to our new home and feather the new nest with appliances, bed, utilities and the basics
Obtain and pay for new health insurance on the open market (Obamacare)
So I guess that my retirement won't be as peaceful as I had planned, at least not in the short run. I'm glad that I managed to get in the Asia trip last year and the cross country drive earlier this year. It appears that I'm in for quite an eventful tail end of 2015 and 2016 and if/when I emerge on the other side of all of this I might be a changed man, at least emotionally if not physically as well. But we play the hand that we're dealt, nothing in life is guaranteed and nobody gets out of life alive. It's just that as we age these truths that we've heard all of our lives slowly become more obvious.
I'm an MRI machine, let me see if your cancer has spread.
Monday, November 17, 2014
The Philippines is poor. So how poor are Filipinos? A pack of cigarettes is cheap, perhaps .50 USD per pack yet cigarettes are often sold by the "stick" because some smokers can't afford to pony up for a whole pack. OTC drugs such as aspirin and paracetamol are sold by the individual pill, just tell the lady behind the drugstore counter how many pills you want (or can afford) and she'll get out her scissors and cut your order from a blister pack.
The Philippines has home grown department store chains like SM and Robinson's but there are also stores that cater to the low income market such as Lopues in Bacolod. In the US it's often said that Walmart sells nothing but cheap Chinese crap but stores such as Lopues make Walmart look like Nordstrom. The lighting is bare CFL, clothes are cheap and they look it, they look like they were tailored by a blind man with pinking shears.
Philippine cities have little or no public transportation so people rely on jeepneys, tricycles or pedicabs to get around. In Manila the Jeepneys look like a cross between a Jeep and an open SUV. They’re homemade and are usually powered by an Isuzu diesel engine. People get piled in tightly like cattle, pay 8 pesos (around .20 cents) per trip. In Manila the tires of Jeepneys are often bald, the lights don’t work,the brakes are questionable and if the drivers have insurance they wouldn't know it because they can’t read or write. Tar black exhaust pours from the tailpipes.
In Bacolod everyone calls them Jeeps but they don’t even pretend to look like Jeeps. They’re old Japanese vans that have had their beds partially enclosed to carry people.
These homemade people carriers belch and bathe passengers and pedestrians in diesel smoke. I could see through rusted or badly welded joints in the floor. They're noisy too. This is what passes for mass transportation in the Philippines augmented by tricycles (a motorcycle lashed to a steel frame sidecar) and pedicabs.
While trying to figure out why the middle class in the Philippines was so small I stumbled across this fantastic opinion piece in the Philippine Star newspaper. The author, Nelson Navarro, makes it clear that the Philippines wasn't always the impoverished economic basket case that it is today and that 30 years ago the neighbors of the Philippines used to welcome affluent tourists Filipino with money to spend. Today countries such as Thailand, Malaysia, Singapore and even China are modernizing and have thriving economies. The Philippines has slums, barefoot feral children, beggars and so many excess people that according to Navarro’s piece 10% of the population of the Philippines lives abroad as OFW’s doing manual labor or are domestic servants. Philippine government officials and their cronies make money off of the export of laborers and maids. The Philippines attracts call centers because Filipinos speak English and work much cheaper than English speaking Singaporeans or English speaking North Americans but attracting other foreign investment where the Philippines has to compete with their neighbors is hard. Really, why should multinational businesses invest here? Infrastructure has been neglected, there’s almost no public transportation so employees can’t get to work on time, electricity costs more than anywhere else in Asia and is undependable so brownouts and blackouts are a regular occurrence due to inadequate grid, bribes are required at every stage of business, squatters are rife and the underpaid police and low level government officials augment their income with bribes. Why not have your office in places that have a modern infrastructure and that work better such as Kuala Lumpur, Bangkok or anywhere in China? According to one of our hosts he fully expects that politicians to take bribes and steal from the public purse. That’s normal behavior in the Philippines and many other places in Asia. “But do they have to take it all?”, he said. Evidently they do and citizens mostly tolerate it. Manila’s public transportation consists of light rail lines (no municipal buses). The speed of the trains is held to around 20 mph due to a problem with the rails and the lack of spare parts due to a lack of money. New rolling stock is needed but a Czech supplier of rail cars was solicited for a 30 million USD bribe to get the business. So what about the politicians? Ferdinand Marcos and his shoe collecting wife were the very models of kleptocracy but he's dead (but she lives on as a powerful elected senator as does her son Bong Bong). Current President Aquino has an actress sister named Kris who is all over the country on billboards as the official spokesperson for a fast food chain, Chowking. Her and a basketball player have a son named "Bimby". President Aquino also has a sister named, I kid you not, "Ballsy". Shockingly Ballsy was recently accused and cleared in a bribery scandal. It's that kind of country and will probably stay that kind of country.
I had wanted to travel from Bacolod to Cebu by bus and ro-ro barge but alas, it is not to be.
I like the intercity bus and have taken it before from KL to Singapore, KL to Penang and back and Manila to Bagiuo and back. All were interesting journeys and different experiences; all good. I was looking forward to taking the ro-ro barge, I last took one across the Suez Canal in the 1980's.
We went to the bus station in Bacolod and it was very 3rd worldy.
Some buses had A/C (everyone here calls it "aircon") and some didn't and nobody could tell us which routes had it and which routes didn't. No advance ticket sales, first come first served on the day of the trip only. All of the buses queued up in the bus station had small seats and open windows but in fairness to Ceres Liner (most bus companies in the Philippines incorporate the
word "liner" into their name) they have 13,000 buses in their fleet that spans several islands. Some of the barges are out and 2 of the 5 daily Bacolod to Cebu runs have been cancelled until further notice. For us the 7 hour bus trip was regrettably out of the question. So we'll fly to Cebu.
Airline travel in general is sterile and often a pain in the ass. We're going to fly Cebu Pacific airlines to Cebu, they're the Air Asia of the Philippines. They have a dismal and self proclaimed on time rate of 63%. After our experience flying from Manila to Bacolod, a 1 hour flight that took 4 hours, it wouldn't surprise me if the bus beat the plane. The bus would've cost $12.25 each plus food and water. Plane will cost $45 each. There are lots of flights from here to Cebu which is about 100 miles east but most have long layovers 300 miles north in Manila.
I had expected Cebu Pacific to try and charge me for sandwiches, snacks, baggage, fuel, insurance, seats and anything they could blow past me on their web page and they did run me through their gauntlet but they even tried to charge me a currency fee. Seeing that I had a foreign credit card they offered me a price in pesos and a price in dollars but when I ran their dollar price through a currency converter it was higher than the peso price when I converted it myself. My credit card doesn't charge a currency conversion fee so I picked pesos. And besides, if I was using a card that charged a currency conversion fee banks are even worse than airlines and they still charge it on a purchase billed from a foreign country in USD. The airline wants to make money, let them get it somewhere else.
Philippine Airlines or PAL or as they say here, "Plane Always Late". Cebu Pacific is owned by the Gokongwei family, another Chinese family who controls this country. I guess I won't get to find out who controls the ro-ro barges.
