Good morning, or whatever it is on your side of the world.

Yeah, I know... I've not been exactly the most communicative person these last couple of months. Bear with me though, because I have a damn good reason. And no, I'm not looking for any sympathy.

Long about October of last year, I started to have issues with my blood sugar and appetite. Yes, I'm a diabetic. My doctor sent me to an endocrinologist to see about having a new medication regime added to bring me back under control.

On a follow up visit in November, I commented to the endocrinologist that I just couldn't get warm. My fingers and toes were cold, and I worried about neuropathy. This had never been a problem before. He examined my blood work, and did some physical manipulation of my thyroid gland. It showed that the gland was abnormally large and under performing.

That next month I had a biopsy done of the tissues of the thyroid. Let me tell you, there's just not enough Novocain for that discomfort. I went home after telling the attending nurse not to call me if the tests came back normal. It was the holiday season, and no news was good news in my book.

The biopsy and ultrasounds had shown that there were two lumps in my thyroid, one on each side of the isthmus. On the left side was a soft squishy mass, and on the right, a hard one. Looking at those ultrasounds from the biopsy, I figured it might have been just a common nodule. It runs in the family.

A week later, and I get an urgent call to come in for a consultation.

Crap.

"Come in at any time your available, and the doc will see you. Don't bother making an appointment."

Double crap.

Ask anyone who's has or has had cancer how the news was broken to them. There's probably protocol they teach at medical school on how to deliver bad news. That hard lump was a Papillary thyroid carcinoma, about 1cm in diameter. The soft one was a common fatty (though harmless) tumor. And the whole thyroid had to come out.

Being the holiday season, I couldn't line up any surgeons until Feburary. I didn't tell my parents and coworkers about this issue until after Christmas. No sense in being a scrooge and making them worry un-necessarily.

My finger kept getting colder, and it became very hard to type. Even switching to my laptop was a stopgap measure. Think of it as a self-heating keyboard.

Looking back, I realize that I was clinically depressed. The situation made it hard to just give a damn. Stopped caring everything but what was immediately necessary. Emails went unanswered, programming didn't get done, and I just put my life on hold.

February 8th, I had the total thyroidectomy. Recovery was not swift; as I turned out to be allergic to something they gave me. Several days of antihistamine induced bliss followed. Synthetic thyroid replacement therapy turned me from sleepy and depressed to tired and not so depressed. From my point of view it was a great change.

The follow-up with the surgeon showed that the carcinoma had doubled in size to 2cm in diameter, and as is the case of this particular cancer, it had micro-metastasized. Think a cluster bomb going off and throwing little bomblets everywhere. Each one has the possibility of growing into a new cancer mass.

Last week, I went through an iodine uptake scan, to see how far it had spread. Looking at those scans, I saw all those little points of light around my throat and sternum. Each one was a hot spot.

So in the next week, I find out how much radioactive iodine (I-131) it's going to take to kill them all without killing me. I'll be restricted to a single room here at the hospital for three or so days while they perform the radio-ablation therapy. Anything I take in with me has to be isolated for up to three months, so I dug up an antique laptop that I've not used in two years, and made sure that I've got mp3's and Civilization 2. Should help make the days go faster.

Now it's time for other business matters that need attending to.

The Exodus Project Chats are not closing. Don't know who started that rumor. That said, the bandwidth bill came due on the first (whoops), and our host would like his cash. I'll be sending that check, but it does clean out the savings account that I set up for this place.

I'm resetting everyone's due date to March 1st of this year. As usual, it's $25/month, payable to this address. If you don't have something postdated by the 31st, I'll close down your chat. If you feel like donating to the cause, just write on the check which chat you're donating on the behalf of, and I'll credit their balance. It may be useful in keeping Ashen Grey open, because at this time, I have no clue who their chat Head is.

HDM Steve, if you're still interested in running that April Fool's project we discussed some time ago, the code is 80% finished and almost ready to beta. I'll be using it to test some ideas for the upcoming dynamic web page codebase and database updates that this place needs desperately. If it works out, I'll be fixing Icehaven and working my way from oldest to newest.

Comcast has not been particularly helpful in removing us from their spamhost list. Though Tony and myself found it annoying that some bot was trying to use the Exodus server for a spam relay, any mail it generated went to two places: Tony and my inboxes. But this was enough for Comcast to go berserk and ban us from their mail gateway. (Rrr!)

Future codebases will include some very basic CAPTCHA's on any form that generates email that exits the Exodus Server (new account, lost password, etc.). Don't worry; it'll be just hard enough to fool the basic bot, but probably not any with decent screen reading skills. If there's someone out there using a screen reader program because of a physical handicap, please contact me, because I've wanted to talk to someone who I can bounce accessible code off of.

Anyway, I guess I'm done for now. It is my hope that I'll actually be well enough, soon enough, to get in some volunteer hours out in the backcountry. Those of you from around the Seattle area know how terribly places like Mount Rainier and beyond got stomped by Mother Nature this winter, and working for the WTA was a blast last year. You really get to know the geology of Washington state when building a trail and you have to pull out stumps by hand. (Grunt!)

-Joshua Woodruff
March 11, 2007