2
#233 – The Mess of My Life
You know that faux food product, “I Can’t Believe It’s Not Butter!”? Well, you’ll believe it if you find it’s been unrefrigerated for four days. (Come to think of it, “butter” doesn’t perform much better than its unbelievable substitute under such conditions.)
This was one of the many indignities heaped on me as I prepared to settle various affairs before leaving the country for seventeen days. As you know – and I hope you are looking forward to – I will be playing in the first World Series of Poker-Europe and providing commentary, as well as providing (as far as I know, the ONLY) real-time coverage of the Million Dollar Cash Game on September 18 and 19.
THE WACO KID
Paying bills has always been the most distasteful chore in our house (though, as the previous paragraph indicated, it’s getting a run for its money), going back to the days when my kids were very young. They would innocently ask, as I imagine most kids do, “Are we rich?” I’d tell them, “No, but we live like we are.”
Between my weird hours, work habits, and payment cycle, not to mention our investing misadventures and back-breakingly expensive lifestyle, I’d rather do ANYTHING than pay bills. And that’s evidenced by the fact that I let them pile up in my office until they topple. That’s when I know it’s time to pay them.
They eventually get paid, though, so we live in a debtor’s paradox. Our bills are massive and our creditors hound us like criminals. Yet we have almost no debt and excellent credit.
Here’s an example. In January, months after the “final” manuscript for THE FULL TILT POKER STRATEGY GUIDE – TOURNAMENT EDITION had been submitted, Chris Ferguson decided he wanted to rewrite one of the chapters with me. (He also had ideas for two additional chapters but, good for the sake of my sanity and bad for the sake of poker education, we didn’t pursue them.) He wanted to do this FROM AUSTRALIA, and it somehow went down that I had to call him.
The call went over two hours and cost so much that my telephone-service provider assumed no one would possibly agree to pay it. Even though I paid it as soon as the bill came – which is rare for me, because I am too disorganized to pay my bills promptly – they STILL sent me a dunning letter and discontinued my long-distance service.
Every month’s bills provide a fresh adventure, and this month was compounded by my EXTRA inattention during the World Series. I discovered, too late, the disconnection notice for the electricity at the condo we own five miles from our house. It’s generally occupied only in the winter and, though I sometimes use it as an office/studio, I hardly ever went by even to get the mail in the wake of the World Series. Consequently, I had to empty the refrigerator of the remains from my Mom and her husband Dave’s winter visit, after they festered in the August desert heat for several days in unrefrigerated glory.
Then I received an entertaining letter from a company called Certegy Check Services, “a service provider for U.S. retail merchants.” I have no idea what that means or why they needed to inform me that they were “recently victimized by an employee who wrongfully removed and sold consumer information to a data broker who in turn sold a subset of that data to a limited number of direct marketing organizations.”
So somebody has marketing information about me, right? “While Certegy’s investigation into this incident continues, Certegy has seen no evidence that your information has been used for anything other than marketing purposes, and is unaware of any instance of identity theft or fraudulent financial activity.”
They should listen to my voicemail on the date I opened this piece of mail, August 31. I received two messages from an investigator from MasterCard. He was calling me on the road from Texas and thought the matter sufficiently serious that he left me his cell number, in addition to MasterCard’s toll-free number for fraudulent transactions.
Apparently, someone used my credit information to obtain $20,000 of merchandise from Home Depot in Waco, Texas. I always used to joke that I HOPE someone steals our credit cards because they’ll probably spend less with them than we do. That finally proved false; Jo Anne wants to find out if he’s good looking.
ONCOLOGY AND POST-FLOP PLAY
On Friday afternoon, as a sort of “cocktail” to bill-paying, Jo Anne and I had the initial meeting with the oncologist who will be administering and overseeing her chemotherapy. Jo Anne has been very cool about the process. She knew it was coming, and she knows it’s going to be icky. She’s prepared to feel tired and nauseous, and she’s prepared to lose her hair.
Meeting with Dr. Kato, a soft-spoken man who seemed very knowledgeable and has a wonderful staff, drove it all home. We already knew that Jo Anne would need a port surgically implanted in her chest, but neither that nor the chemotherapy would begin until I returned from London. We both regarded those 2 ½ weeks as a return to the normal routine of her life.
Nope. She has to get two body scans and attend an educational seminar. He also wrote three prescriptions for anti-nausea medications. The office administrator emphasized that we should get these filled immediately. One of them is so expensive that a lot of insurance companies don’t want to pay for it, and we’ll want to have a lot of time to fight with them before she has to take it.
From what we had read and from preliminary discussions, we heard that chemotherapy consisted of 4-8 treatments, spaced 2-3 weeks apart. For some reason, we assumed it would be 6 treatments, 2 weeks apart. Starting at the end of September, that would mean that the treatments would conclude before New Year’s Day 2008. We could handle that.
Dr. Kato explained chemotherapy will consist of three drugs. The first two will be administered 4 times, with 3 weeks between treatments. The third will be administered after that, also in 4 treatments, with 3 week intervals.
That runs to the end of April, after which Jo Anne will have radiation therapy. She’ll be getting treatment to the end of her school year, a rude awakening when we thought this could be over by Xmas vacation.
Jo Anne has an extremely strong constitution but even she was a little worried by the doctor’s warnings. THREE anti-nausea drugs. (She’s also eligible for a clinical trial for a marijuana-type anti-nausea medication, which we’re looking into, though I’m probably more interested in checking that out than Jo Anne, who has never tried marijuana.)
Then, Dr. Kato went into this long explanation of the constipation that is a side effect of all this toxicity. The best remedy he could offer, though, was prune juice mixed with hot milk, a concoction he said he “heard” works, though he’s never had the guts to try it himself.
That’s the best medical science can do? Medically, constipation is more dangerous and potentially more uncomfortable than nausea and they have three powerful medicines and marijuana for nausea. Hopefully, they have some anti-nausea medication for the prune-juice-hot-milk slumgullion because Jo Anne looked sick just hearing about it.
The idea that this would be a once-in-two (now three)-week thing also disappeared. She is going to have to come in for weekly shots to get her white-blood-cell count up, to keep her immune system from being destroyed. And there will be other visits required for tests and monitoring.
Dr. Kato said, “Do you just want to start the treatments and we’ll do all we can, or do you want to see the statistics on all this?”
Being the knowledge-is-power, super-educated types we are, we naturally wanted to see the numbers. Maybe in this instance, ignorance would have been bliss.
Forget this business about “five years cancer free means your cancer risk is the same as someone who never had cancer.” That’s a wives tale, believed unfortunately until Friday by my wife. With surgery alone, which was successfully concluded a week and a half ago, Jo Anne has a 1/3 chance of NOT getting cancer in the next 10 years. With all these treatments over the next 9 months, her chance goes up to 2/3 of not getting cancer again in 10 years.
Is it worth it for that extra 1/3 chance?
As a poker hand, it’s pocket aces against 7-6 in the big blind. The flop is 2-8-9, rainbow. Which hand do you want, A-A or 7-6? If you go through chemotherapy, you get aces, which are 65% to win. If you skip it, you get 7-6 and have eight outs for a straight, a 35% shot.
Of course, anyone would rather have the aces, but I take that 35% lots of times in tournaments. Three-and-a-half years submerged in the poker world has made the contingent nature of our lives seem natural. But this is possibly for Jo Anne’s life; there’s no rebuy, no other event the next day. Still, chemotherapy is incredibly awful – nausea, constipation, constant disruption of life, losing hair, losing eyebrows, probably missing a pair of bar mitzvah’s we were going to attend in Chicago and Atlanta around Thanksgiving, probably missing a planned trip to Europe with my Mom in the spring.
And even when you get aces, 7-6 busts you 1/3 of the time. I told Jo Anne, after weeks of convincing each other we would get through this fine, that it would be okay if she decided to skip the chemotherapy, got on with her life most likely cancer-free, and see if we can hit the straight draw against a recurrence.
“Are you crazy?”
I just wanted to give her the option, but I should have known that would be her answer. My Mom, who is incredibly brave but acts like she isn’t, went through this nearly ten years ago. First, she was going to skip chemotherapy altogether, but she eventually signed on. In her case, she had actually completed the planned sessions when her oncologist said, “There’s a new drug. If you go through another 4 sessions, it will increase your likelihood of survival 5%.”
“Would you go through it?” she asked.
“It depends on whether I think I’d be in that 5%.”
She went through it, recovered from the experience, and is cancer-free a decade later. Jo Anne had planned on going the same route and is still planning on it. The road just seems a lot rockier than advertised and it doesn’t get us to as nice a destination as we were hoping.
