Infusion Illusion Profusion Confusion -- Real Life Update 10/15/25

Hey Team Tom!

It's been a few weeks, so it's time for another update.

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Uno: My CT scan from last week showed continued improvement -- more tumor shrinkage and less inflammation! I've actually managed to go off of hydrocodone. I can finally sleep on my side again. It's so nice. You don't know the value of your favorite sleeping position until you've lost it.

When last we left me, I had rounded out four carboplatin and pemetrexed chemo infusions, and apparently . . . that's it for me. I asked the doctor for more chemo and he said no. The most infusions they'll ever run is six, and the survival stats past four aren't good? It's confusing, but I trust the oncologist. Now I'm simply running immunotherapy every three weeks.

That all said, man, it was so nice not to be poisoned this past Friday. This chemo does some really wild stuff to me mentally. After the fourth dose, I wrote this note down when I was in the throes of it, "There's a weird side effect to this chemo -- it's like having a quasi-hallucination, but more like a kind of a vivid, strange imagination. Just now I was able to clearly picture a girl with fiercely intense blue eyes that looked almost bird like. It's like a vividness to my dreams while I'm awake (or half awake). There's a tingle to the world as you sit here slowly dying. Shutting down. Not caring. Hard to explain. Listlessness. That's what this chemo does to you."

Now that I'm on immunotherapy only, it feels super easy in comparison. Sure, I was a little tired right afterwards, and my arms and scalp are dry and itchy, but that's nothing in comparison to how dark life got on days three-through-six after a carboplatin and pemetrexed infusion.

Apparently if my next CT scan shows even MORE improvement, then they might even consider moving me to a "stable disease" status, which is where they would cut down the amount of office visits and scans. I have to say that feels very weird, and I'm not sure I like it. While the doctor would be happy with "stable," I want "cured." I guess when you have Stage 4 cancer, you get what you get and just be happy you're not dead, dummy.

I'm hoping I'm lucky and immunotherapy doesn't turn on me, and it does the trick. As ChatGPT put it to me, chemo was running a bulldozer through my body, and now immunotherapy is like putting the guard dogs out to attack cancer.

Everyone please keep sending those vibes my way. I don't care if they're prayers, meditations, or even spoken to the universe in your goofiest Count Chocula voice. You send it -- I'll take it. I VaNt YoU tO vE cUrEd, ViStEr PURDOOOO.

Me and Kyle hanging out with Nanamancer

Dos: As you are well aware, the government has shut down. I am a contractor for the Air Force along with a good chunk of our crew at the company I work for. Unfortunately, that means I am furloughed without pay or even the promise of back pay. Government contractors get the worst of deals when this stuff happens.

Currently I'm burning my own PTO (and someone's generous gift of PTO hours -- THANK YOU) to get me through the past two weeks. It's a forced vacation. The biggest problem with that is that I'm a stupid cancer patient as well. If a CT scan comes up on a random day of the week when we all go back to work, I can't just, uh, not go because I don't have the PTO hours.

By the end of this all, things will be tight for a bit unless I can get some more gifted PTO. The people I work with are amazing, so my chances are pretty good! I also hear unemployment pay is an option if I run out of PTO, and thankfully I have family to fall back onto if it gets really rough.

FIGURE IT OUT, GOVERNMENT PEOPLE!

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Tres: I've been writing some music here and there on my forced vacation. I actually wrote the title track for Cosmic Radiation and Bad Luck. It's sounding great! A little weird, but that's my style anyway. It's like Muse meets Arctic Monkeys meets Dave Matthew's Band meets my style? I don't know. It's my cancer story in a nutshell though.

. . . also worked on some weird, experimental sound stuff that mixes an MRI with the sounds of the ocean since that's what I chose to listen to while I had my brain scan.

. . .also worked on an acoustic cover of an old song of mine from 1993 with my music therapist. She's pretty cool. I like what she did with the song structure to change it from my xylophone and muted distant trumpets thing to a folksy blues song.

. . . also playing a lot of Dune Awakening with Dylan. My friend Dylan is great by the way. He took me to lunch the other day, and I took him to see Tron Ares -- fun show! I liked it!

FREE MAZE! I'll have to do a blog post about that

Quatro: I've been living the single dad life over here with the Uber Wife training in Vegas . . . only Nana is here as well. So what would that be like? Single dad life but I also get to live with my mother-in-law at the same time? There's a sitcom in there somewhere. Nana has cleaned our kitchen, our fridge, our sink, our dishes, our kitchen floors, and done a bunch of other busy work . . . um, the laundry. If you're one of her friends from around here, she'd probably love to hear from you. I imagine hanging out with old friends would be WAY more fun than cleaning our house. She's great though! Happy to be here.

Uber Wife has been having a lot of fun in Vegas on the weekends! She's been sending along fantastic pictures. We'll get out there together one of these days soon. (So jealous she's been to the Sphere and to Omega Mart -- glad she got to have some fun over her birthday.)

We're Meow Wolf fans around here.

Diapermancer (now 16) is still rocking the mellophone in marching band. They've got a pretty cool show this year, and he's doing a great job. I'm proud of that dude. The whole band has put in a crazy number of hours practicing this year.

Amber Deathsong is consumed with work and school. They miss their spouse horribly.

Kyle Skystaff twisted his ankle and hasn't been working much. He's on the mend though. I'm sure he'll be working again soon.

So, there you have it. I'm on forced vacation from Government Shutdown. I'm no longer chemo poisoned. CT scans are doing pretty good. I'm writing some music and doing my thing. Everybody is busy with real life but me and Kyle!

Thanks for reading and keep being awesome, Team Tom!

Happy Dueling!

Teenotaur's first day of high school

It's been "one of those days," and I still need to sneak in a blog post for Blaugust, so I'm just going to talk about how I took my youngest to his first day of high school today. Actually, let's look back! Remember how the Wizard101 community used to call him diapermancer . . .

And then we changed it up when he became a toddler to Diaperzilla . . . Wizard101 humor. :)

Then fast forward a few years and he was out of diapers, I talked about him on the blog because his favorite game in the world was Roblox.

That was 2018, which doesn't seem so long ago until you LOOK AT HIM NOW! 

Y'all, I guess we gotta call him Teenotaur? (He said he'd probably play a Myth wizard if he played Wizard101.) Teenotaur is 6 feet tall with growing left to do. I'm sure I'm going to be literally look up to him in just a couple years. 

He had a great day of school today and is trying to fit in some time to play a little bit of the game he's currently having fun with, Cult of the Lamb. (Pikmin 4 is so last week for him . . .)

Love my guy. He keeps us all entertained and is amazingly talented. I can't wait to see what the future holds for him.

Happy Dueling!

Gaming with the . . . kids these days!

As some of you might know, I have three kids. On this blog I've referred to them by three names:

- Amber DeathSong (now 17 years old)

- Kyle SkyStaff (now 14 years old)

- Diapermancer (now 9 years old)

We might as well keep those names going, and it's been a while since I've talked about this amazing trio, so I snapped a few pictures yesterday as they were playing games and thought I'd talk for a bit about what they've been playing lately.

Amber DeathSong

It's all about the SPLATOON! Lately she's been playing Splatoon 2 (Octo Expansion) on the Switch.

There isn't a day that goes by lately where she doesn't comment to me about how much she loves playing Splatoon and listening to the Splatoon soundtrack. I'm all about that awesomeness.

Outside of Splatoon, she's also knee deep in a D&D campaign, a Starfinder campaign, and I don't even know how many GURPS games she's embroiled in currently, but I hear tales of her roleplaying a character named "Gef Dalby," a paranoid mongoose who's "really good at computers." Her gaming group is made up of artists like her, so they draw each other's characters, like this!

Kyle SkyStaff

Kyle has been playing a metric ton of Katamari Forever lately. I'm not sure why, but it's back in a big way. I was digging for a trailer for the game and found one, but you have to see this other (but related) trailer's intro for "Touch My Katamari" for the PS Vita.

Amazing. No other words can describe that.

This ball of goop has been rolling around on our TV for days!

Diapermancer

So . . . Diapermancer really only has one game of choice, and that's Roblox. This kid is a die hard Roblox player -- he's played it for . . . as long as I can remember . . . and I understand why. The variety of experiences and games you can find on Roblox is pretty intense, plus it's online, and as we all know here on The Friendly Necromancer, multiplayer online experiences is where it's at! He's a kid after his own father's heart.

Can you believe he's grown so much? And to think this kid's birth was announced on the Wizard101 launcher back on the day.  Wild.

He's invited me to play Roblox with him a few times, and I always have fun playing with him. Cops and Robbers is good one we've played together. 

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Anyway, these three have always had interesting game choices (outside of Roblox). Honestly though, I'm just waiting for the time that Paper Mario 1000-Year Door comes back into all of our lives. :) You know it will! It always does!

Happy Dueling

Nosferabbit . . . it's spookies!

Hallowe'en is a big deal in Wizard101. It was their first and only really big holiday content season. Sure, there's vendors and fun stuff for the other holidays, but when Halloween hits, there's towers, and quests, and decorations a plenty! It's fun, but after the hour or two of fun is finished, you were kind of like . . . yeah, I've done this before. yawn. next! However, that feeling coupled with all the in game legends about "what's behind the door next to the storm drain tower", and there's just a lot of awesomeness about this new holiday update for Wizard101!

Mmm hmm! It's a simple quest (at least for level 90 characters) that's cute and short, but it's awesome and a lot of fun too.

Sorry Professor Diapermancer, it took a few years, but now your answer to Bailey Firesword's question is incorrect.



It was Bailey's Skystaff's birthday yesterday, and (for a little bit of fun) we decided to give this new content a run through.

Dworgyn gave us the skinny.

Eek! Sure enough there was a sigil right there in front of the doorway that had been abandoned for so long.

Who knew it would be fortune seeking moles to break in there first and awaken the thirst of Nosferabbit and his undead veggies. After we entered, I ran ahead to check things out.

Bailey calmed my fears *cough* and in the end, we were just a couple meteor strikes and a Deer Knight away from Defeating Nosferabbit and getting to the real prize of this instance! Cheep Bird transformations and a Frankenbunny pet!

I think the Wizard101 team did a great job on this quest, and it was a lot of fun to play through with Uber Wife on her birthday.

We tried to run through Aquila as well, but we ran out of time before we needed to pick up "Professor Diapermancer" from school. :) I'll just save any discussion of Aquila for later.

Happy dueling!

Diapermancer Turns Diaperzilla!

It's been a year since the day diapermancer came into the world! Happy Birthday, son!

He's now walking around and terrorizing the house by getting into everything, just as he should be. He's a beautiful, fun kid and we love him very much!

Nanamancer will be down as well as Grand-ma-master today to celebrate the occassion in style! :-)

Just a few highlights on this blog for him that I'd like to link to (aside from those two up top):

- The day we found out he's a life wizard.
- Cassandra's first Diapermancer cartoon.
- Professor Diapermancer answers a couple questions.

I love you, Sawyer!


Keep gaining those powerpips!

Happy Dueling!

The Making of Diapermancer 4

Looks like Bailey and I are going to have yet another mouth to feed thanks to this wacky test realm nonsense!


Yeah . . . um, definitely might be some "chat issues" with the new hatchery . . .

Can't wait to see what ancient wraith + ancient helephant will equal! At least I know it's a girl! (Bailey's was a boy name egg btw)

Happy Dueling!

Diapermancer is . . . gasp . . . a life wizard!

We got an awesome surprise package the other day! Kingsisle had sent us a little somethin' somethin' from their webstore! We were completely floored to receive such an awesome gift! It was such a sweet gesture and just . . . amazing. I had a huge smile on my face. HUGE! We all had huge smiles on our faces! Amber, Kyle, me, my wife, the monster-in-law . . . mail time has never been such a happy occasion!

And then the worst thing imaginable happened . . . I turned the little onesee over to discover what they had chosen my Diapermancer to be!


NOOOOOooooOOOooOOoo! A life wizard!!!!!!! How can this be?! Amber Deathsong (Our resident life wizard) did a dance around the house, while I just hung my head.


At first I thought he would burn from the pain and torture of wearing a life wizard cloak. And indeed, he looks in pain doesn't he? It was like fire on his skin. HORRIBLE!

But then, in an instant, as if Sawyer was snuggling into Gryffindor like good ol' Harry Potter, he accepted his sorting hat. Seeing just how relaxed he became in his first ever life wizard robe, I relented . . . he certainly must be a life wizard.


*sigh.* I guess I can't always pass on the good genes. (I really hope he doesn't cast an imp on me in the middle of the night for saying that.)

haha! That onesee is a 6-9 months size, but we couldn't wait to post it to you all to show off our cute, little life wizard and publicly thank Kingsisle. Thank you so much for this awesome gift. You're truly a company with a heart of gold. Keeping this blog and getting to chat with employees of Kingsisle every once in a while has been a very positive experience.

THANK YOU!

HAPPY DUELING!