On a lighter note, be careful with the "Puffer salad"

Well, it's big chemo day again. A combination of Herceptin, taxotere and Carboplatin. I started the dexamethasone steroid last night, so my eyeballs popped open at 3:17 AM this morning, and here I am. Good news. I had my midpoint chemo MUGA scan yesterday. A 68 EF versus a 73 EF, prior to starting the chemo. Good to go for the second half.

But, enough about me. As I'm sure many of you know, all these drugs create some pretty wild changes in lots of different things. I'm not sure which drug to blame, but sleep patterns seem to be one of the things that gets changed.

I had this dream recently that was, at least I thought, pretty funny. Our weekly routine at the chemo lab is, blood draw for analysis, visit with the oncologist, then chemo. I see the ecologist about 80% of the time, which I think is a pretty good rate for the doc that's as busy as he is. A few weeks ago, though, I've visited with the physician's assistant, as the doc was out of town at a seminar on cancer treatment. She asked me if anything unusual had happened, so I related the following dream. By this time I was done she was howling with laughter, and insisted that I re-tell this story to the nurses in the chemo room.

I know that this story maybe a little off topic, but I'm telling it in order to lift a few spirits out there. If this is an inappropriate use of this discussion group I apologize. But, the dream was so vivid, relatively complete, unusual (for me), and hilarious, that I have to blame it on the drugs. Given this, I can blame this dream on the cancer.

"Three rather elderly folks go into a seafood restaurant for lunch (two females, one male). They sit down at a relatively small round table. The restaurant is kind of a middle of the road place decorated with kind of a rustic touch. It has the usual fishing nets, lobster buoys, lobster traps, and other seafaring paraphernalia hanging from the walls. Although this is a relatively rustic looking place, the waiter comes over to the table and he's dressed in a full dress tuxedo, complete with black tails, white shirt, white bow tie, black shiny shoes, the works. For some strange reason this waiter guy is definitely way out of place in this restaurant. In fact, he has a white towel draped over his left arm.

The first lady of the group orders the "puffer salad". The other two people in the group, for whatever reason, don't seem to order anything. The waiter goes to the kitchen, and returns shortly with the puffer salad. Now, you need to know what puffers are. Puffers are small animals that are caught in the ocean with nets. They are jelly like animals, with no shell or skeleton. A reasonably sized puffer is about 3 in. long and a half inch in diameter. They are colored very similar to a crabs leg, being that kind of cream color on the bottom and reddish orange on the top. In fact, they have little spiny protrusions on the top, very similar to the crabs leg.

Now, you need to also understand that puffers are eaten ' live'. A good puffer salad is typically served with a nice arrangement of whole leaf lettuce, onion slices, tomato slices, and croutons on one side of the plate, with two live puffers gently nestled onto the other side of the plate. You can easily tell that the puffers are alive on the salad plate because they will be 'puffing'. That is, they will be gently breathing in and out, which will cause them to expand and contract, and hence make them look like they are puffing. One simply puts a fork in the puffer, slices off a piece, which causes it to squirm around on your fork, and you eat it live with some of the accompanying salad materials. The remainder of the puffer will continue to squirm around on the plate, and you simply slice off pieces of that and eat it live as well.

Now, the waiter in the tuxedo comes over to the lady at the table and asks her what kind of salad dressing she would like on her puffer salad. He has one of those stainless steel salad dressing servers that has the post in the middle and the four pots of salad dressing attached to it. The lady says she'll have the ranch dressing. Now, everybody who eats puffer salad knows full well that you don't put ranch dressing on puffers. However, the waiter ladles up several generous spoonfuls of ranch dressing, and pours it all over the salad and the puffers. The ranch dressing causes the puffers to turn violent. In their fit of anger, they coil up, covered in ranch dressing, and spring off the salad plate onto the ladies left cheek where they proceed to suck all the life out of her body. She falls out of her chair onto the floor the restaurant, dead.

End of dream. The moral of this story is that if you to order the puffer salad, make sure that you don't ever, ever put ranch dressing on it."

Time is precious to all of us survivors. If I wasted too much of your time by having you read this, I am truly sorry. But, this had to be a chemical induced dream if I ever saw one. It made me laugh, and I wanted to brighten your day with it.

The raging steroid induced hunger pain appetite is kicking in, I gotta go get me some toast and peanut butter.