2015-12-24 Looking Back

In terms of role-playing games I continued playing my Astral Sea campaign in German, I started running a megadungeon campaign in English, and I’m still running a monthly game for kids. We practically stopped our biweekly indie one shots.

In terms of software for role-playing games I write the Face Generator which I still love and I wrote Gridmapper which I loved but then I discovered that I wasn’t actually creating any dungeons for my own games. I loved Gridmapper for the technical aspect: it’s a single SVG file with embedded XHTML and Javascript. It comes with a demo and it saves dungeons to a wiki for everybody to share, and you can save it locally as well.

Face Generator

Gridmapper

So far, so good.

Claudia and I pushed our running goals. She had been training for 10km runs and decided that in 2015 she was going to do a half marathon. At the end of July we ran 21km as part of our training. In August, a mere week later, she was diagnosed with breast cancer and started chemo. Later we learned of two heterozygot mutations of the ATM gene, meaning that she has two mutated copies, one from each parent. The mutations are not clinical significant, meaning that not enough is known to say whether these mutations are related to her cancer. It is known, however, that mutations in this gene can be related to certain leukemia (and she had one of them as a teenager) and certain breast cancer types (and she has one of them right now). The ATM gene encodes a protein that is involved in DNA repair. Cancers due to failures in DNA repair usually react well to Carboplatin-Taxol chemotherapy, and hers did. Since her leukemia was treated using Anthracyclines and these antibiotics have a cardiotoxic effect, we must avoid them even if they are considered to be a very effective treatment. For all these reasons, we opted for a bilateral Mastectomy with a simultaneous reconstruction of the breast using transplanted fat tissue from her belly. This happened at the beginning of December. The navel was transplanted, skin from the belly was used to cover the holes left after excision of the nipples. The body needs time to heal. Still, the breast tissue was sent in for analysis and some active tumor cells were found. Thus, the chemotherapy had not been the complete success we had been led to believe. Apparently, new research shows two year disease free survival can be increased slightly by an add-on Capecitabine chemotherapy (abstract). We started on that, yesterday.

So, in short: the second half of 2015 can pretty much fuck itself and I’m *hoping for significant improvements in 2016.*

#Love #Life #Cancer #RPG #Retrospective