Jerry Pournelle has sent out an update on his medical situation, dated early this morning, which we reprint here in its entirety:
I am keeping a log on my web site www.jerrypournelle.com. See the VIEW from Chaos Manor.
Simply put there is something growing in my head. It has not metastasized from elsewhere. It is in a place that a top neurosurgeon declines to go into even for a biopsy, so they are flying blind as to what it is. After considerable consultation, the neurosurgeon and oncologist decided to go after it with radiation treatment, which is to say hard X-Rays.
I am about two weeks into that now, daily zaps of X-Rays; it’s covered on my web site. With pictures. I have the classic symptoms of radiation poisoning, small sores, some falling hair.
I don’t talk well. That is, I think in paragraphs and sentences but when I try to talk it comes out SLOW, in gasps, and you can hear me on TWIT 135 if you can stand it.
We had an assessment yesterday and the consensus is that things are going well. My voice is improved. The Bell’s Palsy symptoms seem to be a bet better. I still drool a bit on one side, and while I can think, I don’t talk well and creative energy levels are a bit low. But it does appear that we are getting through all this. Tinnitus comes and goes. Just now it is loud as hell. This morning it was almost gone.
We will not really know how things are going until May or later. There’s a bunch of dead stuff in my head, and like any such matter it takes time for the plumbing to work. If I’d been shot in the arm it would take a while to heal. This is a shot in the head. And of course the hope is that the good stuff will grow back faster than the dead stuff dies, and the radiation will kill the intruder before it kills me. It’s a good bet.
It’s all covered by Kaiser and the only costs I have are the drive down there daily. I can drive. My eyes focus on different planes, but it’s only inches apart so doesn’t affect my driving. I have a handicap certificate, and I carry a cane, for balance, and I’ve taken to walking two miles in the morning and another two miles at midnight. Sable, our Husky, loves that. She thinks she has a right to go out at night now.
It’s enervating and drains creative energy like fury, and I mostly do journalism rather than creative fiction. Some readers recently bought me a MacBook Air and an iPhone to see what I’d do with them, so I have lots of toys to play with, and stuff to write about. The AIR is cool! And I am getting subscribers to my site, enough that I won’t starve for a year or two.
It’s probably cancer, but they don’t know. It hasn’t jumped around or spread out. It’s near Broca’s area, and the neurosurgeon says that even an attempt at a biopsy would “raise quality of life issues”, which is to say he didn’t want to try it.
Incidentally my doctors turn out to have been reading my books since they were in high school. Which is heartening.
And like any Viking, I damned well will face my enemies.