No ones wants to be in the battle, but once you are, you can’t help but fight your ass off.
Category: Thoughts
The We of Cancer
When Josiah was diagnosed, our small church rallied around us. For months, we didn’t buy groceries, do our laundry or keep up with cleaning. I’d come home in the middle of the night from the hospital to find a clean apartment and a full fridge, often with an encouraging note, gift card or check on the kitchen counter.
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As many of you know, my pal Federico Viticci who runs MacStories was diagnosed with cancer a while back. He’s just gotten scan results, and has a ways to go in his fight with his disease. Just reading replies to him on Twitter is more than enough to make me swell with pride from the support the broader Nerd Community is giving him in this time.
Security Blankets
I’m typing this on my iPhone. I’m on my back, with my almost-four-year-old son pressed against my left side. He’s breathing evenly, so I know he’s finally drifted off to sleep.
Tonight at bed time, I couldn’t find his blanket. It’s blue, with a print of khaki-colored cars on one side.
He calls it his “boppie,” a word his little sister invented to describe her favorite blanket.
My wife is out with a girlfriend to a movie, so my SOS text message went unanswered. When I broke the news to him and offered another blanket, Josiah lost it. I couldn’t stand it, so here I am, in a tiny bed, being his security blanket for a little while longer.
On The Avett Brothers and Brain Cancer ⇢
Bob Crawford and I (along with our wives) spoke together on a panel at St. Jude earlier this summer. They are an amazing family.
On Writing and Tools
Justin Blanton, in a piece about moving away from WordPress:
Frankly, I’m just tired of having to upgrade WordPress (and then make all of my little one-off modifications each time I upgrade), tired of having to manage memory on the web server, tired of having to think about whether something I do is going to break the site in some fatal way that I simply don’t have the time these days to fix. The list goes on and on and on. I just want to write.
How To Cure Cancer ⇢
Patrick Rhone:
As a species, we have proven that there is nothing we can’t do if we set out to do so. We have cured the incurable countless times before. I fervently believe that, if we can send robots to Mars and fix elections with money, we can cure cancer. All it takes is the same thing it always has for every one of those challenges…
Care.
Priorities
Over the last few days, I’ve been tweeting about one of Josiah’s “little friends” who — without much warning — entered the final days of his battle with brain cancer late last week.
This morning, this little 3-year-old boy passed away.
(To make it hit closer to home, this kid had the same thing our son has, and they ended up at St. Jude after reading about Josiah and his diagnosis.)
Over the last 39 months, we’ve seen a lot of families come and go from St. Jude. Some kids respond really well to treatment and live cancer-free after chemotherapy and radiation. Other kids, however, don’t share that fate, succumbing to the disease, despite receiving literally the best care in the world.
It’s A Part-Time Gig; But A Full-Time Frustration
This website isn’t my full-time job, but I’d like it to be one day.
My podcast coupled with my writing here (and elsewhere) brings in significant amount of money each month, but it’s not enough to support my family at this point. If I were single, perhaps it would work, but with a mortgage, two cars, two kids and a cat, things add up. (I’m not complaining, mind you, because my family is awesome.)
24 Months
It’s a big month in our household. Our little Allison Mae is turning two years old, which is crazy. She’s talking, potty-training and climbing all over everything.
Allison’s birthday will always be linked — in my mind, at least — with the end of Josiah’s treatment. Just weeks before she was born, he underwent the last round of chemo of his custom treatment plan.
Josiah’s chemo was months of an ever-worsening roller coaster. At the beginning, he bounced right back (amazing for a 7-month old), but as time went on, he took longer to recover. We had more days and nights living in fear of a fever. Day and nights of cleaning his toys over and over. Bottles of hand sanitizer were used. By his last few rounds, he was getting blood every time, to help his body cope with the fact that the chemicals were doing more and more damage to his bone marrow each time.
Bravery
I’ve gotten a ton of email about my post from last night.
Almost all of it has been encouraging. To those readers who have emailed or tweeted me, thank you. It’s nice to know some fine-looking nerds on the Internet have my back.
The word “brave” has been used over and over in people’s responses. Each time I read it, I wince a little.
I don’t see as what I do here as brave. It’s easy to sit behind a MacBook Air, sipping a drink while typing. Sure, hitting that “Send to Blog” button in MarsEdit can be a little nerve-wracking, but it usually isn’t too scary.
On Self-Control
Paul Miller, on leaving the Internet:
I feel like I’ve only examined the internet up close. It’s been personal and pervasive in my life for over a decade, and I spend on average 12+ hours a day directly at an internet-connected terminal (laptop, iPad, Xbox), not to mention all the ambient internet my smartphone keeps me aware of.
I’m not sure what “examined the internet up close” means, but I’ve emphasized the real problem in that paragraph–instead of removing yourself from internet access entirely, how about just, you know, cutting back?
The New Command Line
Google’s search box is the new command line.
In 2004, John Gruber said that the browser’s location bar was the new command line, correctly predicting the massive wave of web apps we all now enjoy using every day.
I think in the 8 years since his article, a lot has changed, including the way we use the web itself. I watch co-wokers search for things like “Yahoo mail login” and “what time is sunset?” and then move on to whatever they wanted to do.