[pasting in from my own facebook page out of laziness. An album update, sort of...]
As of last week, by a very wide margin, the most expensive thing I've ever owned is a bottle of pills I'll eat in 21 days. Although covered by insurance (at least luckily for now) they're just north of a cool ten grand. Impressive.
With apologies for both a repeat of what's old news for some, and an out-of-nowhere 'what the...?' for others, as short as I can make it, had pneumonia a few times in Nov. & Dec. and in treating that, by fluke they stumbled on the underlying cause which is something called multiple myeloma. That's a white blood cell cancer sorta thing (technically a plasma cell, so not actually leukemia but that's sorta splitting cilia (please note bio/hair pun). But because I'm "young" for this (avg. age of diagnosis is usually more like 70) and because targeted treatments have advanced so much esp. in the last few years, my prognosis is almost certainly not as dire as googling might make it seem.
It's not "curable" per se - but here that's not in the usual sense of a dramatic Brian's Song "get your affairs in order, you've got nine months". Here it means more that you're stuck with a longish weekly hospital commute for meds/chemo from here on out (with sooner/later, possibly/probably a bone marrow transplant (not as crazy as it sounds, more on that also below)). So really almost more like a chronic condition like say, diabetes. If diabetes came with free bone marrow.
Or at least that's how it is currently - the drugs that have come out in the last year or so are getting pretty spectacular so there's a lot of optimism that that yo-yo cycle is flattening out and they're even talking cure stuff. And they don't mean Friday, I'm in Love.
I should clarify too that the bone marrow transplant isn't as radical as it sounds - it is currently sort of standard treatment esp. if you're all young & sprightly (which for this, I am) and it is really effective at keeping things in remission, sometimes for years. It's also all done by transfusion, they don't actually go in surgically like a holiday turkey. But it does mean a few-week stay in the hospital plus recovery time. The good part is that here too, because the drug therapies are progressing so fast, they're also defaulting to the transplant less & less soon and it's a bullet I may even dodge entirely.
Anyway, officially started treatment last Thurs. & Fri. in a clinical trial the crux of which tests one new foncy-ponts drug in combination with one of the current standard-treatment three-drug cocktails (actual cocktails now discouraged, sadly). And my numbers have already come down some (that's good).
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Annnd that's pretty much it, we're all caught up. I realize that's a whole lot to come upon between Drumph clips and again, my apologies for both the mass notice and the insane amount of 'me' in a post that's already this long. Initially, I wasn't gonna put it here on F-book etc. but it's become enough of a labor telling people one-at-a-time over the last couple months, getting the wording & tone right (which I don't think I've nailed yet, incl. probably now) that I sort of stopped. So inconsistently, a few people I barely know, know, and others I've known for years don't yet. Which is silly. And since this is almost exactly what Facebook's good for, do my bidding, social media, I need never broach topic again.
I also came to realize that it wasn't fair telling most folks one-on-one because it puts them in the awkward position of finding themselves cast in a starring role in my two-person production of Charles' Big News Email or whatever, under pressure of now having to craft their own carefully-worded reply, all of which puts exactly the sort of DRAMATIC! vibe on the whole situation I was looking to avoid by telling folks casually, as it came up, in the first place.
Lastly, even though it's of no real importance, for the folks I know here via music/band stuff, although I don't know to what extent things will be different with this next record because of all this (i.e. mostly touring stuff, I guess) the whole thing has definitely re-shuffled my priority deck. And for a record that's largely about time, how one spend's what time one has, how I specifically cooked through a half-decade-plus ironically making an album about allotting one's time at the sacrifice of...well, actually living it, I'm at this point even less inclined to hop in a tour van on the multi-week plan.
Of course I say that now. 2017 may also find me booked solo in every Long John Silver's on the tri-state circuit, an accordion on-strap & in pirate costume, singing for $10,000 pills one jig and reel at a time.
Or just covering this as My Eloma...