Buttle Lake

Carfilzomib and Buttle Lake

~ Roger JG Albert

Wednesday, August 17th, 2022 – 2:30 PM

Just got back from the hospital for the first infusion of carfilzomib for the second cycle of this protocol. It went well, but as usual, I’m dexed out. Given this was my second cycle I didn’t have to stay after my infusion for an hour of observation. I had to go to the lab yesterday for bloodwork and the results were available today for us via MyHealth. Things seem to be going moderately well from the looks of my bloodwork. I have some reduction in my paraproteins (not that you should know what that means) which is good news but my kappa free light chains are going up. That’s not good.

However, we did a fair bit of reading about carfilzomib and one of the nasty side effects of that drug is renal toxicity. Given that I have only one kidney, that’s not great news. We just have to hope for the best.

As I said, I had to go to the lab yesterday for tests. What I didn’t say is that we spent the last three days at Buttle Lake in Strathcona Park for a bit of camping with the family. Yesterday, we had to race back to Courtenay to get on the lab waitlist. Around noon I started out at 29th on the list as we came into Campbell River but when we got to the hospital in Comox an hour later, I was down to 10th place which is quite acceptable. I didn’t have to wait too long to get my blood extracted.

Sunday, August 14th, 2022 –

We packed up yesterday and this morning. We were in four vehicles. I rode shotgun in the truck. It hauled most of the food, the banana boats and me. I won’t identify individual family members here. Suffice to say that there were enough of us to pilot four vehicles along with some passengers. We’ve been camping at Ralph River campground on Buttle Lake for upwards of thirty years. We’ve had some wonderful times on that lake, and particularly at that campground. It was such a pleasure getting back there. Frankly, I doubted that would ever happen.

From 2019 a few months before my diagnosis

I already posted this photo on this site, but I decided to post it again because it tells a story of how we had such great fun improvising and adapting the canoe with outriggers, a sail and electric motor. We’ve had the canoe for over forty years. We’ve had such great times with this canoe for decades! This boat didn’t come with us on this trip. I’m not ruling out the possibility that it will again feel the waters of this lake on its keel. Chances aren’t great, but we’ll see.

When the picture above was taken, so was the picture below.

Buttle Lake at Ralph River

You can see that these stumps are a predominant feature in the landscape. Who knows why the loggers left them (probably no need or profit in removing them) but they did and I took the opportunity to draw and paint them*. I can’t remember exactly when I drew them, maybe it was 2014, but that doesn’t matter.

You can see the water surrounding the stumps. They are maybe a half a kilometre from the campground and there are connecting pathways. Below is a photo of one of those pathways, the one they built for the movie See with Jason Momoa. That pathway and surrounding terrain used to be clear from the campground down to the stumps with a gravel base and not a lot of vegetation as you get closer to the lake. Now, as you can see, it’s flooded and there’s lots of vegetation, but the rocks that define it are still clearly visible.

The lake must be at least three metres above what it was when I took the above picture in 2019. The stumps are nowhere to be seen. They are all underwater. What a dramatic change! What a metaphor for life! Things can change so quickly and dramatically.

Main pathway from lake to campground.

Monday, August 15th, 2022 – 6:55 AM

I was awake for some time before 6:55, but that’s when I got up. The sky was pure blue. The previous evening it was overcast and spit a little rain. This morning was beautiful. Our campsite was open to the lake but the path to the lake was impassably muddy and crawling with Western toadlets to boot. We really had to go around to Jason’s pathway to get to the lake. I set up a chair in our campsite (called a gravity chair)facing the lake. For some time I watched the sun hit Mount Philips across the lake. Eventually, the shadow cast by the mountains behind us on Mount Philips reached the lake, but by then I was busy doing other things and I got distracted by this as I pushed myself vertical in my chair:

Cedar Boughs.

I actually took this picture later in the day after the sky had clouded over. I stared at this sight for a long time. There is an odd quasi-symmetry to the branches and needles. I contemplated drawing this, but I just couldn’t garner enough energy to do it. Instead, I took pictures and stared. I found looking at these boughs soothing. My pain dissolved. I relaxed completely. Such a great feeling…at least for a time!

I can’t thank my family enough for making it possible for me to get back to this lake and this campground. I’m an old man now. Many of the things we did for years like camping and messing around in boats are just not possible for me anymore. Maybe if it were only a question of age, but it’s not. Myeloma and chemo complicate matters immeasurably. Still, when I was at the lake I could much more easily recall so many pleasant experiences we had there. I love that place. It’s so much better to feel love for this place and for my family than to dwell on my health or lack of it.

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*See my art blog for images of the Buttle Lake stumps in ink and pencil: https://rogeralbert.blogspot.com/p/drawings.html

Ship (a canoe, really) of fools!

~ Roger JG Albert ~ 2 Comments

Ship of Fools.

Alright, I have a confession to make. I’m not always the most reasonable person around. The photo above is of our fifty-year-old, sixteen foot “Huron” canoe outfitted with outriggers, a mast and sail, along with a deep-cycle battery and an electric motor, and paddles of course. First off, it’s a canoe, not a sailboat, but it did sail very well in moderate to somewhat higher winds. It’s tied here to a stump on Buttle Lake near Ralph River Provincial Campground where we recently spent a few days. The lake was relatively calm. We probably paddled and used the motor to get to this spot not far away from the campground. 

On another day, however, we went out in relative calm and while we were out there, the wind blew up. It often does in the afternoons on Buttle Lake. We sailed very quickly to a spot down the lake called Auger Point, a three-kilometre run. Getting back from there was anything but pleasant. We should have known better. Happily, we had the motor that I cranked to full power but even with that we had to paddle at ramming speed to get back to the river mouth where we kept the boat tied up, maybe a kilometre to our camp site. That was one tiring run home. It would have been different had we been able to sail closer to the wind, but with the sail we had and the lack of a leeboard, we were in for a rough upwind fight. Carolyn and I are experienced canoeists and at no time did I feel like we were in trouble, but paddling as hard as we could was feasible even ten years ago, not so much now that I’m 72 and Carolyn is handicapped by arthritis in her hands. Still, we are strong paddlers and we made it without swearing and berating ourselves too much. Now, having done this once and also having promised ourselves to never do it again, what do we do? We go out there again on another day and get caught in the snottiest wind and wave conditions I think I’ve ever seen on the lake. What can I say? Again, we went out on a day that promised to be benign so we headed up the lake looking for a nice place to swim. We paddled down to a bay maybe four kilometers from the campground but there was someone on the beach playing music and fishing from shore. So, we headed down and across the lake to a bay still some distance from the campground where we knew we could skinny dip. As we enjoyed the beautiful lake water and the most enjoyable swim, the lake decided to turn against us, and the wind started blowing strongly from the north. We set out with the motor at half throttle, but we soon had to up that to full throttle and full on paddle to boot. Well, we’ve had some situations in the past where we paddled as hard as we could against a wind without making much headway at all. But we were young then and had much more energy and stamina than we do now. Coming around the point close to the campground we were hit with two-foot chop. That was fine as long as we were able to paddle directly into the wind, but that was not possible as we rounded the point moving east towards the campground. We were abreast to the wind, paddling as hard as we could with the assistance of the motor, and we were being beaten hard by the waves to the point where we started taking on water from the port side. Sensing that we probably couldn’t make it back to the river’s mouth where we would have preferred to leave the boat, we turned the boat downwind and took her into shore on a muddy, unpleasant part of the lakeshore, but still within easy walking distance to our campsite. That’s where she stayed overnight. 

The next morning, we took her around to the river’s mouth. We were exhausted, especially me, and I hurt everywhere. Silly us. After that episode, we got reasonable and didn’t do it again. Actually, we got our best swim of our stay on Buttle Lake a couple of days later with no trouble. 

The family joined us last Thursday and that was great, but I felt a pain in my right side and shoulder that was getting worse and worse. There’s no doubt in my mind that fighting the extreme winds on Buttle not once but twice contributed significantly to my injury. I was definitely injured. The pain got so bad (pushing 9.5 out of 10) that I was very relieved to know that I had some T3s in my toiletry bag. I took two and felt hardly any relief. Later, I took two more along with some CBD and THC (I have a prescription for them). I managed to sleep fitfully although some people might suggest I was not sleeping as much as in an altered state of mind. The next day the pain had not attenuated at all, and we had to leave the campsite and head home. I couldn’t help pack up at all and my son-in-law was conscripted to drive the truck home towing our old eighteen-foot Holidaire trailer. I could barely sit still on the way home, having to shift my weight often to try to lessen the pain. The drive home was uneventful, but I still hurt, easily pushing 6 out of 10. 

After being home for a bit and still at the end of my rope trying to deal with pain that prevented me from even taking a deep breath, I took two ibuprophen, went to bed for an hour or so and got up feeling fine. A miraculous recovery! I would have taken ibuprophen a lot earlier, but I was counselled in 2002 after my left kidney was removed because of cancer that I should avoid anti-inflammatory meds. I didn’t take any until this past weekend and just took two more a few minutes ago. The meds are still keeping the pain at bay, but I’m loathe to keep taking anti-inflammatory meds like ibuprophen because they are hard on the kidneys. So, tomorrow I call my doctor and make an appointment to see if there are any alternatives to ibuprophen I can take that might help mitigate acute pain. I’m used to chronic pain, but the acute pain brought on by the foolishness in our canoe was untouched by acetaminophen, even with codeine, and even supplemented with CBD and THC. My problem seemed to me clearly one of muscular inflammation. It’s clear that I need a solution to deal with acute pain because I can’t promise to always be reasonable in the future. My family was extremely supportive, and I love it for that, but I feel that I need to pull my own weight too. I will not always have my family there to support me if I get into unreasonable trouble again. I need good meds too!