28 years ago you built a garden, and for 28 years you have nurtured that garden and watched it grow beautiful and strong. The garden, the envy of so many other gardens, has also drawn the attention of many a mole, a drought, and a storm.

This year, a hideous storm, more dark and vile than any your garden had ever weathered before, rolled onto the horizon. Having withstood countless storms that had overwhelmed other gardens over the years, your garden just laughed at the storm. “I’m stronger than any wind, rain, or hail,” that garden taunted, “do your worst.”

The storm did not reply. Instead, the skies darkened, an early night casting itself over the plains. Lightning and thunder heralded the presence of the clouds and rain. Still, the storm said nothing.

A flash of light. Lightning struck your biggest sunflower, knocking it to the ground. A rumble from the earth and a crackle from the air shook the garden. The storm smiled to itself. Another awesome burst of light and the furies were unleashed; a torrent unlike anything your garden had ever imagined, and surely unlike anything it had ever before survived, poured down fiercely.

“I tore down the Hanging Gardens of Babylon,” the storm cackled with pride, “what chance do you stand, little garden?”. But no matter how hard it rained down on that garden, no matter how hard the storm blew its winds, it could not harm your garden.

Hours of rain passed.

Days of snow, weeks of tornadoes, and months of hail all blew away. Finally, after years of trying to destroy your garden, the storm, its voice reduced to a hoarse wail, screeched: “As a little squall, it was I who chased Adam and Eve from Eden! You are nothing!”

But your garden, glistening as the sun’s rays broke through the storm’s weakening clouds, couldn’t help but laugh at the storm, “You are wrong, I am something.”

The storm clawed at the air as it was pulled back over the mountains, trying desperately to keep itself together. “What?” it hissed.

“I am loved.”

The storm stopped fighting as it noticed your sunflower, standing taller and stronger than ever before, in the center of your garden. In its last moments as a storm, it considered why you would help the plant in the worst of conditions that it had created. It was baffled at why you would waste your time. It gave one final cry as it realized it would never find out, its clouds rolling apart into the wondrous blue sky.

Mom, Dad: your garden wants to thank you for watering, feeding, and protecting your flowers for all of these years. Your sunflower, in particular, feels an overwhelming sense of gratitude for helping it weather storm after storm, no matter how dark and vile the skies may have been… or will be.

Happy Anniversary to two of the most wonderful gardeners I know.

–Reid, your Sonflower.

Based on my complaints, Rachel, my nurse, wanted to see me in the Oncology Clinic today. So here I am in the Oncology Clinic getting fluids and painkillers and stuff. And I’ll be coming back tomorrow for some blood. All the tests they ran revealed that on paper I look great.

Despite that, Rachel and Janey, the PA who has taken very good care of me on a few recent visits, confirmed that it’s the Ara-C making me feel so cruddy. In fact, more specifically, it’s the super low dose of Ara-C that I’m on making me feel this cruddy. Janey told me that the little kids with other kinds of Leukemia get 3,000 mg per meter squared of Ara-C every 12 hours. Me, I get a mere 75 mg per meter squared every 24 hours. I don’t know anything about math, but that’s clearly big amount twice as often vs. small number half as often. Hearing that makes me feel like a real baby. An overly dramatic baby, if you read my last post.

Amy reminded me that last time she was here while I was still in the hospital, I was on Ara-C and it made me so miserable that I can’t even remember it. Which, unfortunately, I can’t really remember. But it’s been secondarily confirmed by my dad.

I’ve come up with this new slogan for Ara-C:

Ara-C: It makes you feel like crap!

I imagine it will increase sales dramatically.

–Reid.

5 am. this is the tenth time i’ve been up to pee since i went to “sleep” at 11:30 last night.

too hot. too cold. too hot. too cold. open a window. bundle up. turn on a fan. hide under the blankets. hot. cold. my body can’t make up its mind.

from the top of my game, to this. fevers. rashes. headaches. nausea. swollen organs that hurt like an s.o.b.. diarrhea. late night trips to the the e.r..

delayed intensification part 2. i feel sicker than i’ve felt outside of the hospital yet. i feel sicker than i have in a long time.

whether it’s the cytoxan i got at the clinic on monday or the ara-c (cytarabine) my mom has to inject me with every morning or both, i hate this game.

dad says as much as it sucks, this is how we know it’s all working.

so much pain all over. so much ache and hurt. i can almost feel my cells being ripped apart.

yeah, it’s working.

the cure makes me feel worse and worse and worse.

so when can i have the cure for the cure to my disease?

i’m tired of this damn burn on my back. it’s been eight months, go away already.

i’m tired of all of this. i feel weak and sad. my body is weak. it’s offensive, it’s abominable, it’s loathsome. it’s sick.

i don’t want to be sick anymore.

I felt absolutely fantastic as I waltzed into the hospital at 7:00 AM this morning. The feeling was a continuation of a weekend in which I felt better than I’ve felt in months. The mouth sores–now, once again thought to be from the chemo, not herpes (sorry Varisella Virus, I hope we’re still cool)–are gone. The aches, the pains: gone. In the past few days, I went to PT, I went to get ice cream, I saw Swing Vote, I ate delicious Ethiopian food for the first time with Big Sis and my cousins, and I even went to a birthday party.

And, yeah, my hair is falling out again as a result of Delayed Intensification Phase 1’s Doxorubicin. And, yeah, as opposed to when I was in the hospital, my beard was falling out, so I shaved it, leaving just the hipster-doofus (as my dad calls it) mustache and soul patch. And so, yeah, I look really silly. But who cares? I felt great.

So I was a little nervous to come in to the hospital today.

Don’t get me wrong. I wasn’t afraid of not passing counts again like last week. In fact, I was quite certain I’d make the grade today and be eligible for the seven hour chemo. But… after feeling so good, how could I knowingly roll the dice and potentially feel so crappy again? I mean, hell, I’d have to get six hours of fluid injections so I could pee out all the Cytoxan they’d just put in. CyTOXIN (thank you, I just made that up myself) can damage the kidneys and bladder, and probably a lot of other stuff. So, of course, they’ve gotta take it out as fast as they put it in. And I… well, jeeze, frankly I just liked feeling good.

But, of course I’m here. I’m at the hospital. And I passed counts (1950!). And I got the Cytoxan. And I’ve been peeing like a race horse (I’m under the impression that they pee a lot for some reason). And I’m going to get it injected into my brain (I think I may have left that detail out before). And it’s fine. It’s all fine. I just hope that sometime soon I feel as good as I’ve felt over the past few days, except not just for a few days. For forever.

That’s what this all comes down to: I hope. They can hit me with all kinds of chemo, they can knock me on my ass, they can radiate my head, but I remember now what it feels like to feel healthy. And I hope I can feel that way again soon.

–Reid.

Over the years, The Varicella Virus has never treated my family well:

-When my dad was a kid, he got shingles. His face is still scarred to this day, a la Harvey Dent.

-My mom had chickenpox as a child. Then she had it again as an adult, at which time it entered her body and covered all her internal organs. She nearly died and some guy stole her spotted x-rays from the hospital (seriously).

-To avoid getting chickenpox, Becca stayed with friends when Mom got “the pox” as an adult. Becca came home and got chickenpox anyway, despite Mom being in the hospital. The very house we live in later admitted, in a court of law, to being an accessory to the crime of passing on an annoying-if-not-deadly virus.

-I had chickenpox twice as a teenager. And now it seems, well… let’s just say it turns out that my mouth and throat sores might not, in fact, be from the chemo. Let’s just also say… I might, in fact, have oral herpes. How. About. That. This raises several questions. Such as: where did they come from? Who gave them to me? And, what is the capitol of North Dakota?

Unfortunately, in my immuno-compromised state, someone merely looking in my direction could have given me herpes. Someone who didn’t even have herpes, mind you. There is no certainty of this, but my sores have lasted long enough that the oncology docs have speculated that our friend Varicella might be to blame. As if that’s not terrible enough, in the words of one of the oncology docs, “it should be assumed that, as a chemo patient, the sores go from the mouth, down the throat, all the way through the digestive system, down to the anus”. The anus, ladies and gentlemen. My anus.

With that beautiful realization, I’ve been put on antibiotics that should help fight the maybe-virus off.

Damn well better.

–Reid, in a slightly embarrassed huff.

“Best of New York”
Peoples Improv Theater
Upcoming Events

Better Than the Machine: unLEVINed
Better Than the Machine’s newest sketch show, unLEVINed explores whale love, open mics, pigeon mating rituals, and homosexual relationships. For the first time in Better Than the Machine’s history, founding member Reid Levin has had no involvement in the show. But why? Find out in August at 11pm, only at the Peoples Improv Theater.
Friday, August 8
11:00 PM
$8

“Dammit,” I said. It was the first word out of my mouth this morning when I woke up. My mouth and throat felt more swollen and more full of sores than yesterday. The radiation burn on my back was screaming at me. I had left behind a nice dream where these things didn’t matter. Just as bad, having realized that I was in extraordinary pain, I rolled over and checked the clock. It was 7:00 am. I remembered looking at the clock at 5:00 am before falling asleep. My brain hurt.

Dammit, indeed.

Turns out along with the mouth sores, the radiation burn, and the matching washer and dryer set, I had a fever. That’s an automatic ticket to clinic. Dad drove me to the hospital and left when Mom arrived so he could make it into the office. Mom spent the rest of the day with me. A bunch of tests were run that we won’t know the results of for a few days, including a blood culture to look for bacterial infections in my blood and an HPV swab test to look for the Human papillomavirus.

We did get the results back from one very special test. The news was great: my white blood cell count is up to over one thousand (the preferred number to safely start the next phase of treatment). Hopefully, along with moving on treatment, this will give me the strength needed to fight off this oral infection, and perhaps even whittle down the radiation burn site, which at this moment is covered with necrotic (dead) skin. I also received a powerful antibiotic that should help me heal faster in all those departments.

Oh, and I left the hospital with one of my ports still accessed today, in case I need to go back to the hospital this week. Which isn’t that hard to believe might happen, as I’ve been there for four of the past six days.

oooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooorooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooo

The preceding line was written by my face when I fell asleep on my keyboard only to be awakened by Becca, who didn’t realize I was asleep. I’m so tired that I keep typing nonsense like “They tested the cake for ferrets,” which didn’t seem strange on the first re-read, but on the second, kind of stood out. The only reason I didn’t fall asleep moderating today was because there were so many interesting crazy people.

Anyway, it’d be awesome if I could get a few days off chemo this week where I don’t have some bizarre side effect still lingering in my body. We shall see if that is meant to happen.

I’m going to go take a nap. oooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooo

–Reid.

Mom and I arrived at the oncology clinic a little after 7:00 this morning. By 8:00, I was hooked up, via one of the metaports in my chest, to an IV pole. Kristin, my infusion nurse, drew blood and separated it into tiny test tubes that were shaken, not stirred. Before she left to deliver the blood to the lab, she started the flow of fluids into my metaport at a rate of 1500 mLs/hr. It’s a tremendous amount of fluid, and within 15 minutes I already have to pee.

The blood is currently in the lab, where someone will look at it under a microscope and manually count the number of white blood cells they see. If they see enough, which is sometimes described as at least 750 and sometimes as many as 1,000, I will begin Delayed Intensification Phase 2 today. If I don’t pass counts, I will finish these fluids and then go home chemo-less, hope my white blood cell count rises, and come back next Monday to do it all over again.

If I do pass counts, I’ll finish the two hours of fluids, and then move on to a half hour drip of Cytoxan, followed by four more hours of fluids. The idea is to get the drug into my system to do its thing, and then get it back out as fast as possible so it doesn’t do much lasting damage to unintended Reid parts. I’ll then get two doses of Ara-C, one IV and one IT (the port into my brain fluid). It’s gonna be a long day.

Unfortunately, I am extremely uncomfortable today because I’ve developed a lot of mouth sores over the last few days. I’ve been very lucky to have never had them before considering how common they are with many of my chemotherapies. The damn things go all the way down my throat, so it hurts to talk, to swallow, and to do anything else with my mouth (eating solids is right out). My primary onc nurse, Rachel, discussed a milkshake-only diet for the next few days. Eating only milkshakes is a sacrifice I am willing to make.

Aside from the beastly sores, I’ve been feeling extremely well for the past few days, since the steroids completed their withdrawal from my body. There were a few good days in there, and I’m glad I got to do a few things and see a few people while I was feeling so well.

Despite how good I feel off chemo, I’m hopeful that I will pass counts today. I don’t want to get too far behind in my treatment, of course, but I’m also trying to plan around my chemo to hopefully visit the East Coast soon. My fingers are crossed.

Which made all of this very difficult to type.

–Reid.

EDIT: Well, the counts are in. I’m at 690; we’re going home and will return next week. Dang. I’m gonna need a milkshake.

Yesterday I spent a great deal of time at the hospital receiving painkillers and undergoing tests. Severe pain in both of my arms had kept me awake the entire night before. So severe was the pain that, as little sense as it would make, I was actually concerned that I had broken both of my arms somehow without noticing. It turns out that the pain was from going off last week’s course of steroids, and given some time and narcotics, the pain is now getting better.

Luckily, that business did not effect my trip to Las Vegas, which was fantastic. Before we’d left Sin City, I won some money playing blackjack, ate at some great (and, okay, some not-so-great) places, and saw some really great comedy. On my birthday, we saw Wayne Brady’s show, which was unlike anything I’ve seen before. It was definitely a Vegas show–not something you’d see in NYC especially. There was singing, dancing, lots of improvisation, and it all focused around this one incredibly talented guy. It was really inspiring to see such a good live show that was so different from anything I’ve seen before.

It was also really great to spend so much time with my Dad. Even if we’d just hung out and not done all the other fun stuff, that made the whole trip worth it.

Oh, and thanks again to everyone for all the birthday messages. It was great to hear from so many people!

Finally, I realize that I need to give some answers to questions that keep coming up about my new job and my new dog. So here they are in FAQ (Frequently Asked Questions) format:

Q: What is your new job?
A: I am a comment moderator for The Huffington Post.

Q: What the heck is that?
A: I’m basically a censor. I approve or delete comments that site visitors post on news and blog items.

Q: Why?
A: In an attempt to promote civil discourse.

Q: Is it working?
A: Not really.

Q: Why not?
A: People are especially mean about politics on the Internet.

Q: What’s the deal with this dog I keep hearing about?
A: He’s a puppy we recently got from an animal shelter in Boulder. He’s adorable. His name is Ferris Bueller. We think he’s a Bijon Friese/Westie mix.

Q: You said he was “the Devil”. Why is he “the Devil”?
A: He’s not really the Devil. He’s just very needy, and sometimes makes it hard to get anything done. He’s a troublemaker.

Q: You sound mean; doesn’t he just want your love?
A: He cries if you leave the room. I love him lots, he’s great. He just gets to be a bit much–

Q: You are a dick.
A: That’s not even a questi–

Q: Do you write editorials for The Huffington Post?
A: No, I’m just a comment moderator.

Q: Did you write the one about McCain’s golf clubs?
A: No, I don’t write anything for them.

Q: Is there some sort of left-leaning slant to that Huffington site? It seems like there’s some sort of left-leaning slant to that Huffington site.
A: Just a minute, I’m sorry, my dog is… making it hard to… typ–

Q: Don’t hit Ferris!
A: I would never hit a dog.

Q: Are you the Devil?
A: Maybe.

–Reid.

I made it out to Vegas yesterday with my Dad and Uncle Danny. I was still uncertain of going during the last few moments leaving the house, so I’m happy to say I just kicked myself in the ass and made it happen. As Rachie kept saying, it wasn’t like I was having a good time doing nothing at home–I might as well do that in Vegas, if anywhere. So my recovery continues in this sinful city, which I am finally visiting for the first time since turning 21.

We saw Craig Fergeson (the Scottish host of The Late, Late Show) last night and had a really good time. We’re going to try to see Wayne Brady tonight. Both comics are quite obviously extremely different, and they’re two that I’ve been wanting to see live for quite some time; so that’s very exciting. We also played some Blackjack, which I look forward to playing more of later!

Dave Burdick sent me this picture story for my birthday. It’s pretty much the definitive version of my life’s story right now (even if by an unauthorized author), and is much appreciated. Maybe by next year I will give Dave another picture to use. But probably I won’t.

I opened up my spam emailbox this morning to find an email entitled “Lobster With 10 Watches”. I do not know how this could have possibly been misconstrued as spam. Gmail tells me that a summary of the message contains the phrase “New Stuff available this weekend! Luxury stuff for Olympic Games!” You know, like Lobster Watches. Ten Lobster Watches.

I think I had some other stuff to say. How eloquent,

–Reid.

P.S. Thanks already for the number of calls and messages; hearing from people is always my favorite part of my birthday!