Tag Archives: testament

Tales From City of Hope #6: What Does Kevin Smell Like?

by ELTKassandra Posted on April 24, 2015

Mother Jones

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As you recall from yesterday, the DMSO preservative used to keep my stem cells fresh was alleged to cause a distinct body odor. So today, after the transfusion, I asked everyone who came into my room what I smelled like. The results are displayed on the right in chart form because Science™.

The results were disappointing. My sample size was dismally small, and 100 percent female. No single result rose to the level of significance at the 95 percent level. There wasn’t even a modal response. In fact, it was worse than that. One respondent said garlic, but all four of the others said definitely not garlic. One said sweet and another said not sweet. And one person said there was no odor at all.

The best I can conclude is that there is an odor of some kind, but everyone smells something different. I should add, however, that the test conditions were suboptimal. I’m such a good stem cell producer that I only needed two bags of cells. Some people need as many as ten. This means less DMSO for me and therefore less odoriferousness. Beyond that, given the poor state of the data, your guess is as good as mine.

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Tales From City of Hope #6: What Does Kevin Smell Like?

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Tales From City of Hope #5: My Stem Cells Have Come Home to Papa

by BrianneJessep Posted on April 23, 2015

Mother Jones

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It is 9:49 am PDT on April 23, and my stem cell transfusion is complete. It took less than 20 minutes. Now the stem cells just have to graft and start multiplying, each of them eventually maturing into some kind of blood product (red blood cell, white blood cell, platelet, etc.). This will take about a month, but I’m not home free even then. It turns out that these will initially be “baby” cells, and it takes them about a year to fully learn how to do their jobs. Who knew that itty bitty cells had to attend cell training school?

The entire remainder of my visit at City of Hope is just waiting for my immune system to recover and to keep an eye out for severe side effects in case they happen. In a few days I’ll be losing my appetite, but apparently this is because I’ll be losing my sense of taste. In the past, I’ve lost my appetite due to IV painkillers in the hospital or extreme fatigue at home. In both cases food tasted normal, but I just couldn’t stand the thought of eating anything.

So will this be better or worse? Presumably, food will be tasteless but not repulsive. That strikes me as no fun, but actually more tolerable than being actively repulsed by food. We’ll see.

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Tales From City of Hope #5: My Stem Cells Have Come Home to Papa

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Tales From City of Hope #4: The Smell of Victory in the Morning

by Heriber8089 Posted on April 23, 2015

Mother Jones

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Chemotherapy is over and tomorrow is Tag Null: that is, Day Zero, when they pump my own frozen stem cells back into me. The entire process takes about 20 minutes, but I’ll be in the hospital practically the entire day getting liters and liters of IV fluids. This is partly to keep me hydrated and partly just because they want to keep me under observation for a while.

But here’s the interesting thing. The stem cells are kept in a preservative solution to keep them fresh, and apparently this will give me a strong body odor of some kind. But what? One nurse said I would smell like bad garlic for a day. That sounds bad. But a different nurse said I would smell like creamed corn. That seems more tolerable. Yet a third suggested it differed by nationality, and a white boy like me might small like iodine.

But which is it? To me, of course, I will smell fresh as a new-plucked daisy. It’s only other people who have to put up with my olfactory weirdness. In any case, I plan to ask everyone who comes into my room what I smell like. Spoiled tuna? A lovely cheese casserole? Bacon and eggs? Who knows?

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Tales From City of Hope #4: The Smell of Victory in the Morning

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Chart of the Day: Obamacare Is Popular!

by Zeniarwpzz Posted on April 21, 2015

Mother Jones

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Guess what? Obamacare’s popularity has been rising slowly but steadily for the past two years, and in April it hit a milestone. According to Kaiser, it is now more popular than unpopular. Not by much, but at least it’s making progress.

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Chart of the Day: Obamacare Is Popular!

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We’re Bombing Syria, Just Like Obama Said He Would

by AntoineScroggin Posted on September 23, 2014

Mother Jones

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The front page is dominated almost entirely this morning by the news that we’re bombing ISIS militants in Syria. I confess that this doesn’t strike me as worthy of quite such breathless coverage. Two weeks ago President Obama said he was going to bomb Syria, and now he’s doing it. Did anyone expect him not to follow through on this?

But of course I get it. Bombs are headline generators whether they’re expected or not. After reading all the reports, though, Dan Drezner is pessimistic:

I said last week that I’d start making point predictions here. So, here goes: I’m 70 percent certain that there will be no fundamental change in the Islamic State’s hold on territory in Syria and Iraq for the rest of this calendar year.

That’s probably a good bet. This isn’t because aerial campaigns have no value. Of course they do. It’s because in most cases they have limited value unless they’re used in support of ground troops with a well-defined mission. And so far, there’s no well-defined mission and no one is committing ground troops to the fight. Presumably the new Iraqi government will send in troops eventually, and then we’ll see whether our commitment of air resources was worthwhile. Until then we just won’t know.

As an aside, for the next few months I’d treat virtually every announcement from either ISIS or the Pentagon with extreme skepticism. Some of what they say may be true and some may not, but there’s really no way to know which is which. We can parse all this stuff til the cows come home, but that won’t change our fundamental ignorance. Don’t take anything at face value no matter where it comes from.

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We’re Bombing Syria, Just Like Obama Said He Would

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