Some Initial Next Steps

While I can't say I've completely come to grips with last Thursday's news (does anyone? ever?), I have come to some conclusions about some of my initial next steps. Lacking anything better to write about, I figured I'd share...

First up, I have reviewed the details in the consent form, talked with my doc, and decided I'll go ahead and throw my hat in the ring to participate in a clinical trial of something called Xilonix. which "represents a paradigm shift in cancer treatment" (hahahaha). Industry PR aside, it's Xilonix is a monoclonal antibody that (remember: I am not a scientist) tries to turn off one of the proteins cancer cells rely on. The trial is designed to see both if the drug works to hold back cancer, but also to see if it does so without as many of the side effects as some other treatments. My doc isn't really convinced on the former, but he does think there might be something to the latter.

Fair enough. I can always do with fewer side effects. More important -- and this is really the reason I'm willing to sign up -- the reason I haven't spent the last two years being treated with fifty year old technologies is that a whole bunch of cancer patients before me signed up for trials of all the drugs I've been taking: Irinotecan, Xeloda, Lonsurf. And frankly, I owe those people a debt. As shitty as my treatment has been, it was a whole lot worse back in the day. Unfortunately, I can't really do much for the folks that came before me, but I can do my bit for the folks that will inevitably follow. And if the data from my use of some experimental drug will help the docs figure out the next progression in colon cancer treatment, they're welcome to it.

Of course this assumes I meet all the inclusion criteria. And even then, there's a one in three chance I'll be given placebo rather than the drug, which would be slightly disappointing but a) control data is as important as experimental data, and b) I'll never know which I'm getting anyway. 

So that's my progress on the health side of things. I've also had progress on the work side of things.

I used to always joke that, given my age and lack of retirement savings, my "retirement" would be the ride in the ambulance from my desk at work to the hospital when I had a heart attack and died. But while it's coming a hell of a lot sooner than I expected, my boss and I have figured out a plan for something of a retirement-lite. In short, I get to whittle my job down to the parts of the work I like (e.g., system development projects and finding work process efficiencies) and offload the parts of my job I don't like (e.g., approving time cards) to the people that were going to have to take it on eventually anyway. 

A brief aside: The timing proved somewhat perfect. While I was in the UK, I got an email from a contracting officer in the Department of Health and Human Services with a contract. Of course, I ignored it until I got back and then passed it on to my group to process. All federal contracts are, simply by their natures, horrendous,* but this one was particularly so in that, aside from my name and my employer's name, there was no other meaningful information in the paper. The "project name" was the name of the Federal funding program, not our project. There was no reference to our proposal at all. The Feds just pulled my name out of the online contracting system, slapped it into a template document, and sent it out.

So anyway, it took about two weeks for my group to figure out what this was for, and reach out to request the other documents we needed to get this thing processed. 

So today I get an email from the original contracting officer asking if we'd made progress with our review. I wrote back explaining that we have a backlog, but it was queued up to be processed.

About ten minutes later I get another email from a different contracting officer explaining that a two week delay in signing, excuse the language, a fucking federal contract, was "unacceptable." 

And then a few minutes after that I got a voice message from a third member of the Federal team amplifying their position that a two week delay was unacceptable, and making clear that I needed to get my shit together and get the contract signed and back to them asap.

Deep breath. Deep breath. Deep breath.

I started working on an email that began, "Dear Everyone, It's because of people like you that Donald Trump is a viable candidate for President..." but then I thought a) that in all likelihood at least one of them would see that as a compliment, b) I really didn't want to spend one of my few remaining hours on the planet writing a nasty gram to the Federal government,** and c) while I don't give a crap about this $90K contract, no doubt someone in our organization cares a lot about, and it didn't seem prudent to do something that would cause the Feds to take their ball money and go home. 

But dealing with this kind of shit definitely falls in the half of my job that the folks who will be replacing me can take on right away. Like tomorrow. 

Ok, what other next steps have I figured out? Oh yeah, ballooning. Apparently, it's a big thing in Seattle. Big enough that I spent fifteen minutes talking about my gift certificate with a company that didn't actually issue the gift certificate. (I figured there was only one company, so went to the place I knew.) Anyway, we got that sorted -- and the woman was very nice -- so now it's just a matter of getting all the people who want to go coordinated (the hard part) and scheduled (an easy online calendar thing). 

And trips. I'm thinking Alaska very soon (i.e., before the weather changes), and NYC shortly thereafter. They won't be long trips, but both are places I've been meaning to see and both are close to people I'd like to see again as well. So with luck, I'll have that nailed down in the next week or so as well.

All in all, except for the bit about dying fairly soon, I have to say my life's going pretty well. 

* Feeling masochistic? Try Googling "federal acquisition regulations" and dig in.

** Not only would that be a waste of time in and of itself, when my Dad died we found a number of angry letters he'd written to Bill Clinton and others. We're doomed to become our parents, but this just seemed a little too close for comfort.