Don't care if you don't like it.

Sally said, "I spend a lot of time trying to be understanding and rational, but that seems to be in short supply in other people these days, so I'm feeling particularly nasty, and need to say something. Why should I care when it seems no one else does? If you don't like it, I don't care. I'm ranting.

Things I'm hating today:

(1) People who don't read what I write. Jesus, fucking, Christ. I'm so sick of people that pick out a phrase or two that I write, latch on to that, interpret it the way they want, and then think that's what I wrote. I'm not that good at sub-text. Actually, I suck at creative writing. Everything I say is exactly what I mean, nothing more, nothing less. Why is confirmation bias so strong, and reading comprehension so fucking weak?

(2) The military for choosing to use us vs. them psychology in their training. "The ________(insert military branch) is the best. Make sure that you say civilians with disdain dripping from your tongue. They will never get it. They will never understand. Just smile and pat civilians on the head, silly little people that they are. They've never "served their country". They're not heroes. Everything that we do is done in service to our country. We fight for their freedom so they don't have to. If you haven't served in the military, you can't understand. Our fellow soldiers are the only ones that will ever understand. The rest of you are too selfish to get it. That's O.K. We take care of you as well as look down on you like children. Thank God for us. God bless America.

(3) You said something that I violently disagree with and take personally, so I think I'll leave now and never try to talk it out. God forbid I actually behave like an emotional adult and try to work things out. Next, you'll expect that I put on my big boy/girl underwear and think of other people. Perish the thought."



Why am I thinking I'm so much better than everyone else right now? Because I'm wearing my "bad" hat, I guess. I wish I could really say what I think all the time. I love you all. I hate you all. I love me. I hate me. I'd leave me too. They give me pills and a person to whine to, and I'm still not any better. I'm glad that Obamacare will put me before a death panel. Babies, the elderly, and the disabled have it made. I'll say hi to Trig for you. Damn I wish I could believe what the mainstream believes. I ask too many questions. Just change the subject. I'll never be perfect enough for you. I wish that leaving is what I did best. I wish that I could just write you off. Now just where did that patriotism gene get to? I always wanted the Americans to win in the Olympics when I was 10. Doesn't that count? Whine, whine, whine, whine. Is this enough feeling for you? Stop being so literal. Make adjustments for other people, but never expect them to make them for you. Be nicer to other people than they are to you. With my mother praying for me, I will just skip through purgatory. Suckers. I hate you for teaching me not to trust. The geographic cure never works, even in cyberspace. If you are smart, you're stupid. If you are stupid, you're smart.

Shut up, I'm not talking about you.

When I say that I appreciate you for something, I really mean it.

Pigfuckers. I miss you.

RDM, read this and weep. The Emmy is mine.

Home is a state of mind

Being comfortable in the world is not something I'm used to. I've just never quite fit in. Not contemptuous enough for the liberal elite of who I am nominally a member, not able to just accept the traditional world of my rural upbringing. Always just a little too off, somehow. I'm the one that stands just outside the circle of the socially accepted in any group.

We all have homes of multiple sorts; a hometown, a workplace, friends from various stages of life. But I found a very rare home in a circle of bulletin board friends. How it started and how we all got there are things that are only interesting to those involved. Minimally united as "haters" of a pretentious "work of art", we maximized diversity on every other plane. We fit no stereotype imaginable. We came together and separated a billion different ways. Different countries, different ages, different religions, different politics, different jobs, different levels of every psychographic dimension you can think of. We argued, laughed, and discussed everything under the sun through page after page. What you looked like, how much money you made, how strange the rest of the world found you never mattered. The only thing that mattered was who you were.

Can you imagine being able to drop the everyday facade that society demands you put on and just be who you are and have people actually like you for that? Like any group of people who spent time together, we sometimes got on each others' nerves, and diversity made clashes inevitable. But we could disagree one day, and a day later, laugh hysterically together at something else. Everyone counted, everyone mattered. The dynamism of the inside of the group made the dynamism of the rest of the world more bearable for me.

Our group is under threat from forces both internal and external. Before it completely disappears, I wanted to write down how much it meant to me. When I found it, I was emerging from a decade of serious illness having retreated into a very small world just to be able to survive. Deeply unsure of myself and how I would re-join a world that never really seemed to want me, I found a haven that was not of my world but knew what I was talking about nonetheless. No matter how insane I found the rest of the world, I was always home there. Home the way it should be: comfortable, irritating, familiar, challenging, but in the end accepting of your individuality. Thank you for accepting me. It has been an extremely rare pleasure to be part of your lives. I loved us all.

She was worth everything I could do for her.

Read this from MSNBC.

Scientists turn to pets in fight against cancer

Last December, Luisa Bozano's dog Einstein was diagnosed with brain cancer. The large tumor took up most of the 8-year-old boxer's left brain lobe. With few options, the owner settled on surgery to remove as much of the tumor as possible, along with half of Einstein's skull, which was replaced with a polymer-based cement.

Things were going well until midyear, when the tumor came back.

Now, it had tentacles, like an octopus weaving its arms through the vital organ's neural cells. The only treatment option left that might thwart the tumor's progress was an experimental therapy that involved injecting a virus into the dog’s brain. The virus would theoretically infect only the rapidly-dividing cancer cells, and later, an anti-viral treatment would be administered to kill the virus along with the infected tumor cells.

The scientists plan to someday use the therapy in humans. But Einstein would become the first being to test it out.

"He’s very bad, and this is his only shot," Bozano said.

Einstein is one of about 6 million dogs diagnosed with cancer in the United States each year. From this large group, a new research field is growing, known as comparative oncology, which uses companion animals (mostly dogs) as models for human cancer. Cases like Einstein's provide a unique opportunity for scientists to test out novel cancer therapies on naturally arising tumors, as opposed to the artificial tumors typically induced in lab animals. Researchers hope the knowledge that stems from these therapies could help both people and their furry friends.

Recent strides
This isn't the first time dogs have been used as models for cancer research. They were guinea pigs for human bone marrow transplantation methods in the 1960s and 70s and limb-sparing procedures for bone cancer in the 1980s and 90s.

But in recent years, scientists have realized that there is huge potential for pets to help us in the fight against cancer, and in 2003, the National Cancer Institute (NCI) founded the Comparative Oncology Program. This program aims to use pets to learn more about the biology of cancer and help test and refine novel therapies for translation to human cancer patients.

"For 20 or 30 years, we've been able to say, the comparative approach has made a valuable contribution to the field of science, and most particularly, the field of understanding and treating cancer," said Dr. Melissa Paoloni, a veterinary oncologist and NCI researcher. "However, in the last four or five years, the strides have been much more significant."

The complete sequencing of the canine genome in 2005 advanced the field even further, as scientists can now study the genetics of dog cancer and apply that knowledge to human cancers.

Why Fido?
Why use pets? For one, cancers in companion animals arise spontaneously, like cancers in humans.

"The disease of cancer in our pet animals is much more complex and sophisticated than what we can replicate in the laboratory," Paoloni said. "All of the problems with cancer that human patients have are mirrored in our pet population."

Like human cancers, pet cancers can become resistant to chemotherapy, can reoccur after treatment and can metastasize, or spread to other areas of the body, which can be "a terminal diagnosis for all cancer patients, regardless if they have fur or not," Paoloni said.

Another big advantage is that scientists can evaluate new treatments on pets fairly early on in the cancer's progression, whereas, with people, they might have to use the new therapy as a last resort when the cancer is significantly advanced.

“We may be essentially disadvantaging therapeutic strategies that might work in an upfront setting by choosing the worst population of [human] patients to test,” said Dr. Barbara Kitchell, director of the Center for Comparative Oncology at Michigan State University's College of Veterinary Medicine. But in pets, scientists can use experimental treatments right away since there are no set standards of care for animal cancers, and they are able to have a better understanding of what the outcome might be if the tumor is treated early.

Humans and their pets also usually share a similar environment. That means dogs are exposed to some of the same cancer-causing agents as their owners, and may develop similar cancers from these environmental factors.

Since dogs generally have a shorter lifespan than people, their cancers will progress more rapidly than human cancers, allowing scientists to see the disease outcome in a shorter timeframe. “If you had a treatment and you’re waiting to see the five- or 10-year survival follow-up be in a person, that timeline is really compressed in the dog,” Kitchell said.

A ‘different spectrum’ of cancer
When dogs and people have the same type of cancer, the biology of the disease can be quite similar, Kitchell said. But the frequency of the different cancer types varies between the species. “[Dogs] have a different spectrum of disease,” she said. Some cancers that are common in people, such as breast and prostate cancer, are rarely seen in dogs because they are spayed and neutered. Also, dogs don’t get lung cancer as often, because they don’t smoke; and their high-fiber diets protect against colon cancer.

But cancer research in dogs can still inform cancer research in humans, even if the cancers are not the same. That's because two different cancers may be very similar at the molecular level — the cellular process that leads to skin cancer in dogs could resemble the process that leads to breast cancer in women, for example. Scientists can take advantage of this similarity to use dog models to develop a human therapy targeting that cellular pathway.

Additionally, some rare cancers, so-called “orphan diseases” in people, are not so rare in dogs. For example, dogs, especially large breeds, are much more likely than humans to get bone cancer, a disease that primarily affects children.
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Scientists can take advantage of these high rates of rare cancers and use dogs to study “orphan diseases” on a larger scale than they would perhaps be able to in humans. “It’s very hard to get enough human beings together to model [a rare cancer], but we can do that in the dog very easily,” Kitchell said.

Guiding drug development
Researchers and pharmaceutical companies have been able to use dog models to help them design human clinical trials and develop new cancer drugs. For example, from 2003 to 2006, Dr. Phil Bergman of the Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center in New York used dogs to develop a vaccine for melanoma, or skin cancer. The vaccine was approved for use in dogs in 2007, but the research results have aided scientists that are working on a similar vaccine for humans.

"Data generated in trials in pet dogs can be used to help guide the design of human clinical trials," Paoloni said. These trials can help scientists learn how to use the new drugs at an optimal schedule, understand what drug levels to aim for, and examine adverse events or toxicities that might be associated with the therapies, she said.

Testing out new therapies in dogs and other pets does have a down side. Therapies might be so tailored to work in animals that they do not translate across species. Also, pharmaceutical companies worry that drugs that may be perfectly safe to use in people could have bad side effects in dogs, Kitchell said.

“What if they encounter a side effect in a dog trial that puts in jeopardy a lead compound that the company is testing for FDA approval, and now they have to explain why dogs have this toxicity, but people would never experience the same thing,” she said, referring to the Food and Drug Administration.

Even so, pharmaceutical companies welcome the opportunity to have new models that might aid them in the very costly and usually unsuccessful process of drug development. A new oncology drug costs about $1 billion to develop, and only about 5 percent of all oncology drugs ever make it to the market, Paoloni said.

"That amount of attrition and loss in the process, and the expense of that loss really has also made the drug development community more interested in finding new models," she said.

Personalized medicine
In the future, doctors hope to be able to tailor cancer therapies to an individual's tumors. Called "personalized medicine," such therapies involve taking a sample of a tumor, analyzing its genetics, and coming up with a prescription that is designed to treat that particular cancer.

But before the era of personalized medicine arrives, Paolini said comparative oncology is the best model for scientists to truly study this type of individualized therapeutics.

"I see the development of personalized medicine strategies as being one of the most unique and interesting contributions of the comparative approach that we're going to see come to fruition over the next few years," she said.

For dog owners such as Bozano, taking part in a clinical trial for a novel therapy offers a final chance to take action that may keep her dog alive. “That was to us the last hope, the last thing to try,” she said.

And in Paoloni's experience, owners want to enroll their pets in these clinical trials, not only to help other animals, but also to help people. "Knowing that studies used via the comparative approach will also be used to help human patients, I think that's been a very valuable teaching point and motivation for the client-owning pet community." Paoloni said"

Why should you have read all that? Because I did this with my Sasha Annie 15 years ago when it wasn't mainstream and took a lot of heat for it. When she was diagnosed with a brain tumor, I was told she would have only 6 months to live. I enrolled her in a brain tumor research project at WSU that was using special radiation to treat brain tumors. It might have helped her, and it would be good research for other animals and people too. She lived almost 4 years more, eventually dying of something else that even an autopsy couldn't identify. I took her to many vet visits and MRI scans, traveling 5 hours each way, but I knew it was worth it. Sasha Annie was not in pain, she had good quality of life, and her case was used so many times to help others get some more time with their families too. Her data is cited in over 50 journal articles. She lived so long that everyone at the school knew her. When WSU vet students met Sasha, they would look at me and rattle off her file number because she was a legend in the Neurology Department there. She lived longer than any other dog in the trial.

Why bother writing this? This is for all you assholes who second-guessed me, convinced in your self-righteousness that this was just another "crazy Elizabeth" story. "Isn't is sad how she can't let go of her dog? That poor dog." You never believed me when I said that it helped so many more dogs and people. That was just "crazy Elizabeth" talk, trying to convince herself that she was doing the right thing. Fuck you! It's too bad you won't see this, but just writing this makes me feel so much better. I was right, and Sasha's extra years did have meaning. Everyone else can just go to Hell!!!

I knew I made the right choice at the time. Even if she had died on the operating table or from the radiation, it would have been worth it. I knew that then, just as I know it now. But it's never too late for a little external validation.

The body is my stalker

The body controls my life. If I don't focus on the body maintenance, if I miss a step, it punishes me quickly. I'm exhausted or feel awful. Then I have to drag myself through days where I know I'll make mistakes because I'm sick/tired and judging myself for allowing the situation to happen. Or I end up asleep, not getting done what I want, judging myself for that. Everyone tells me, "Well, you need to make sure you don't do X so you don't end up with Y." Simple, yes. But dammit, constantly managing the body feels like I am living with an axe hanging over my head. A single mistake, I'm hating myself and paying for it physically.

Watch what you eat, when you eat it, and how you eat it. Take your blood pressure. Take your pills. You must take your pills with food. Are you eating enough fiber? Too much? Have you had enough fluids? What type, when? How clear is your urine? Have you eaten too much fat today? Is your stomach digesting anything? Are you bloated? If you don't eat, you'll be sick from low blood pressure. If you eat too much, you'll be sick from slow digestion. How many calories have you eaten? Don't gain weght or you'll be sicker. Did you get enough sleep? Did you get too much sleep? Did you exercise today? How much? Anything hurt? If you do too much, you'll need more sleep. Do too little, and you are not getting stronger. What's the pollen count today? What's high? Should you stay inside more? You'll be sick if you get exposed to too much pollen.You'll be sick if you don't get enough sun. How are your stress levels? Are you upset about something? You lucky dog, your body overreacts to stress. It is aging you faster than other people, and you can't do a damn thing about it. Stop feeling stressed. Well that means that I have to think about why I do what I do, and manage that too. Stop being so sensitive. I WAS BORN THAT WAY. If the slightest life tragedy gets you, then all bets are off. The body will make you pay for that too, often for days, maybe weeks at a time, depending. Not my fault. Doesn't matter. Still stuck in here, in the body. Don't get upset. Don't get mad. You can't afford that. Calm down and manage. Or the body will get you.

And while you do this all day long, get a job, be good at it. Be good to all the people who support you. Without them, you are stressed more. Calm down and manage. Or the body will get you.

Now, try to have a life. Friends and fun. Things that make you happy, contented, satisfied. Guess how much time and energy you have left for this? Don't let yourself feel sad,upset, or frustrated. You can't afford that. Calm down and manage. Or the body will get you.

The most fun

The most fun comes when you are not looking. Most people I know spend dollars on going out: movies, bars, shopping. I don't have the cash for that, but I don't get much fun from those things anyway. Most movies are boring, I can't drink anymore, and getting more stuff is no fun, in general.

I spent 4 hours yesterday watching my 9 year-old Belgian Tervuren scan the sky obsessively for swallows in my neighbor's yard. Each one she saw was chased and herded as only a fiercely-driven herding dog can. Herding flying birds is not normal for the herding group. Sure they will herd ducks or geese on the ground for practice, but most herding dogs were bred to work on sheep or cattle.

Yesterday, she was entranced by the swooping swallows, circling around, diving to the ground, soaring up again. She followed them endlessly as one after another dove through the yard. Two other dogs were obsessed too. There was the English Springer Spaniel that taught Gryffindor about swallows and a young mini-dachshund who just found it fun.

Great fun, it was. Sitting there watching my beautiful Tervy girl chase, spin, and fly herself across the ground. Her eyes were so bright. Her tail held high wagging in the tight arc that meant high interest and happiness. I sat there on the driveway laughing and smiling, petting all the other dogs that weren't hypnotized by the swallows. I could have watched her forever. She was doing what she loved. All my dogs have taught me huge lessons. My Sasha was a warrior/queen. Patton and Elizabeth I in one. My Robyn was just like the song: Don't worry, be happy, joy incarnate. My Bitsy, my little girl, was a lesson in love that wasn't supposed to be, but where there's a way, there's a dachsie. My Gryffindor, she is the athlete. Her joy is is in movement, even just for movement's sake. She is elegance and grace; classic lines and classic looks. She has a turbo speed where her feet barely skim the ground. I never saw such beauty in movement in my whole life. I catch my breath when I watch her.