Leroy's Art Blog

A family tussle in Ellen's apartment in Seattle. Diane, Roy, Alice, me and Ellen. The picture behind us is a favorite of mine. The statue growing out of Ellen's head was a gift from Matt, a ceramic celebrating the Chinese opera The East is Red







I’ve been in Seattle for a week, and it has been good. Roy and Alice are delightful kids, independent, curious, energetic, friendly and trusting. They have been going to an Akiedo class every morning, and earned their “yellow belts” by the end of the week. We spent a lot of time swimming at Madison Beach, and just hanging out together.

Ellen has some six paintings on display at Liberty, a gallery-restaurant here in Seattle, and one of them has already sold. Another was the cover of the Seattle Stranger this past week – it was always a pleasant surprise to see her strong painting in the street newsboxes.

And this feels like I am writing an itinerary – nothing of interest to beyond the very good feeling it gives me in my gut to be together with my family and feel their concern and love. But this is such a change from June, which was a tough month alone in Washington with all that ominous medical testing followed by the ultimate evil diagnosis and the changes it forces into my life and my planning for the future. Maybe the important thing is simply that this past week has been such a break from all that.

Still, I am reading the informational booklets from the Int’l Waldenstrom’s Macroglobulinemia Foundation now and then, trying to understand more fully just what has gone flooey in my immune system and how the experts think treatments actually function. It gets into the process by which plasma cells are created in the bone marrow, and that turns out to be a very complicated sequence indeed.

I can’t get my hands around this disease. They say that the timing when treatment is started does not make any difference in the survival rate. OK, that is clear enough, as the treatments are palliative, not a cure. But the argument for delaying treatment (chemotherapy) is that the response to successive treatments tends to decrease. Therefore holding off as long as possible may maximize the chemo effectiveness over time. But some treatments, in some people, does seem to provide complete remission. Yet, the medical comments are that even this is not a “cure” and it is not certain that even this “complete remission” prolongs life in any way. This just doesn’t make sense to me.

Meanwhile, it continues to be a wonderful break, here in Seattle. Right now it is 68 degrees and sunny, headed for a high of 79 today. And I am so looking forward to visiting Deena and Kent (PC buddies from Tanzania) in Portland later this week, and to camping in Glacier and Yellowstone National Parks next month with Matt, Paola, Roy and Alice!