Chemo Fingerprints and Tapering Again

Rather than start with something serious, let's have a little fun at my expense.

I'm bald again.

Why? Well, this has a lot to do with it:

Need a clearer view?

I decided that I had little enough hair that I could just trim it myself with the beard trimmer. It looks okay with a modern-style crew cut, so that's what I was going to do.

I forgot, however, to check the charge on my beard trimmer before I began, and it was completely dead by the time I was done with one side of my head.

Oops.

My trimmer doesn't run plugged in. Plugging it in is just for recharging.

We were one our way to Freed Hardeman University to finish enrolling Caleb,  and I really didn't want to show up there as a punk rocker. On the spur of the moment, all I could think of to do was to use the razor that doesn't require batteries. My good ol', three-blade, disposable razor.

It took a little while, but I got it. My disposable razor doesn't have a setting for "3-day beard" or anything like that, so bald seemed to be the only choice.

Everyone seems to agree that I look ten years younger bald, so I like that, but I'm not staying bald. Here's a picture in better light. I'm not mad; I'm just squinting at the sun and trying to hurry because I'm not supposed to be out in the sun ... especially with all that forehead exposed!

Resolving Last Week's "Seizure of Persons"

I was trying to think of a Christian way to deal with the events of last week. My arrest was not a big deal. I brought that on myself. My son's arrest, however, was ridiculous and leaving the issue alone so that it could happen to the next person did not seem like an option to me.

A couple days ago, I was struck by what should have been obvious. Just go talk to the sheriff, and see if he'll do something about the situation!

So yesterday I dropped in to make an appointment. He was in, and he saw me immediately.

I added this picture just to
have something pretty to contrast
all the pictures of me.

We went back and forth a little bit, but in the end, I think I have to acknowledge that there is no way for the sheriff's office to double check the warrants that are issued to them. He offered to show me the stack of warrants that they have outstanding.

They do have to be double checked, though, and some attempt needs to be made to contact those, like my son, that obviously don't need to be picked up in the middle of the night. Protection against unreasonable warrants is a right that the constitution says "shall not be violated."

The place that needs to happen, however, is in the county clerk's office, where the warrants are issued. As it turned out, the sheriff had already talked to my lawyer, and both of them had already talked to the county clerk's office. They are already putting a system in place so that appeals, which happen at the circuit court in the middle of town, are registered with the justice center, which is on the bypass on the edge of town.

I think they were embarrassed that no system was already in place, and they're rectifying that as fast as possible.

Does no one appeal decisions in this county? Is this really the first time this has ever come up? Maybe there's just not much reason to appeal a general sessions court ruling, and it happens very rarely.

I also talked to him about the condition of the jail cell, and the sheriff told me it's already their policy to clean the cells between prisoners. He promised to leave his office and go straight in to check on the condition of the cell I was in and ask about what happened last week.

So overall I was pretty happy with that. Our lawyer is involved in the discussions with the county clerk's office, so I'm confident he'll make sure the system they set in place will never again put him in the position of having one of his clients arrested while the case is on appeal.

Chemo Fingerprints

One thing I forgot to tell you was the great difficulty they had fingerprinting me last week. Fingerprinting has come a long way since I was fingerprinted every time I moved in the military in the 80's. No ink is involved now. There's a scanner, and it puts a picture up on a computer monitor.

The computer kept rejecting my fingerprints. Finally, the guy doing the fingerprinting asked to see my hands. Then he showed me the crevices running the length of my fingers, including right across my fingerprints. After he showed me those, he turned the monitor my way so that I could see that not only did I have these crevices running the length of my fingers, but I had tinier ones crossing my fingertips as well. We couldn't see them, but the scanner was picking them up. It looked like someone had made a checkerboard with tiny squares all over my fingertips. Behind that checkerboard, we could see the whorls, loops, and arches that are supposed to make up my fingerprint. It was like they were covered in a mesh net on the screen.

Can you see the lines on my fingers and the web design on my index finger? The computer could see them, too; better than it could see my fingerprints.

Here's a closer view. There's a lot more lines too small to see that the computer picked up.

So we took 7 or 8 prints of each finger, and then he picked the best one. The computer itself only approved one or two.

The Taper

After the rough month of July, I was scared on Monday when we dropped back to 7.5 mg of steroids instead of 10.

Worse, on Tuesday I was very sick. I was exhausted, had diarrhea, and I was constantly nauseous. I slept a good 7 hours over three naps during the day besides what I had slept the night before, and I went to bed at 9 pm.

Wednesday, I woke up feeling as well as I've felt since I left the hospital. I got up, took one of my cars to the repair shop at 7 a.m., then walked a mile to a different repair shop to pick up our other car. It was after that I went to see the sheriff.

I guess I really was sick on Tuesday, not just reacting to the steroid taper.

We'll see. We're not tapering any further until the doctors see me again, and that won't be until September 13.