The Digg Reel Episode Wherein I Cuss Out Stephen Colbert

Thanks as always to the great folks at Revision3 for continuing to invite me back, even though I act this way.

This Week in FUN - hibernatin'

Wanted to update everybody regarding This Week in FUN, the weekly show I do with my BFF Martin Sargent on the TWiT network each week. If you’re a fan of the show, the following probably isn’t going to make you happy, but if you hate us and think we’re the devil’s spawn (thx for the emails, btw, I absolutely adore being compared to Satan, best compliment ever), this will probably make your night:

TWiF is going on hiatus!

Here’s why - as many of you already know, Martin started his new rockstar job this week, which is awesome… and has also severely limited his free time to do things such as shooting TWiF on Friday afternoons. It’s totally probable that in time we’ll figure out how to carve out the necessary amount of time each week to restart the show, but at this point, we can’t say exactly when.

We’ve also been contemplating the future of TWiF with Leo and his team ever since the show had to switch gears in October, when I lost my driver’s license and was unable to drive to Petaluma to shoot the show in person. Netcams are great and all, but the overall quality of the show has suffered, and as a result, so have our viewership numbers. Because of the way TWiT is set up and because my hands are tied, it makes sense not to continue with a less than stellar product, for us and for you.

So we’re going dark for a bit. Hopefully we’ll resurface sooner than later. I love you all and I can’t tell you how much I appreciate your support. If I could bake a cake that showed how much I appreciate your support, it would be the BIGGEST CAKE EVER, SO BIG OMG SO BIG. SO. BIG. 

I hate saying this, but… stay tuned. If you have any great ideas or wisdom to share with us in the meantime, here’s the place. God save the Queen.

I made a guy galvanize. For my next trick, I will move mountains.

2010: A New Hope.

I meant for the following post to be written before 2009 ended, but since I’m still asking myself what year it is and walking in circles, I figure I’m still within an acceptable time period to participate in the whole year-end blog nonsense. And I’m way past due to write something here anyway, partly because I haven’t since November when I basically said life was peachy and let’s ride off into the sunset, and partly because formspring.me is dumb.

You know what else is dumb? 2009. What a shit year, amirite? Ok, that’s not completely true, but I wouldn’t put it at the top of my list (1990, for example? Great year. Top 5. I went to the Washington Monument!)

For a brief but dreadful part of 2009, I was afraid I was going to die, and although I’ve experienced the process of death from very close range in the past, I’ve never felt as though my own time could be up any second. That was a pretty heavy time period for me psychologically, and I spent too much of it being overly anxious about relapsing, popping lorazepam at the encouragement of my neurologist only to become dependent on it to sleep through the night, and feeling disappointed by a few people I cared about that didn’t (in my eyes anyway) end up being very supportive. Let’s just say I felt lost and alone at times, blah blah.

Then my brain got better and I was really really happy and full of a renewed lust for life, which led me to do some impulsive things, like fly to Paris for eight days without enough seizure medication to last me because I was in some sort of you-can’t-kill-me-I’m-unkillable mania and forgot to refill my prescription, which forced my mother to have to visit my neurologist’s office, pick up my drugs, and smuggle a few days’ worth via FedEx (in order for it not to be seized at French customs, she listed the contents as “plastic toy” and you can imagine the looks I got at the FedEx office in Paris when I picked it up. Whatever, France, all your fashion models are topless, lighten up). Paris was maybe the BEST WEEK EVER.

Thanks, Mom. You were already the best mom to ever walk the great Earth, but now you’re the best mom who throws French laws about transporting prescription medication to the wind so that her daughter can ride on the back of strangers’ scooters and dance on Parisian tables without worrying about ending up in the hospital unconscious and convulsing. Badass.

If anyone from the French government is reading this, I’m totally kidding.

But by getting “better” my life hasn’t exactly returned to how it was before, which has been a difficult transition for me into this new year. Even though I’ve come to tolerate my medication pretty well and it’s become part of my routine, it still makes me feel slow and dizzy and I find that I’m pretty much useless unless I take it right before bed and sleep off the worst of it. I also still can’t drive. I expect to be able to sooner than later, but the DMV paperwork to get your license back in situations like mine is ridiculous. Also, I own a Saab, which just makes the whole thing funnier.

Oh, and the infectious disease specialist that I said I was going to see in my previous post? A real pro, loved her. What she told me - and I think if anyone knows this, it’s her - is that if for any reason I stop taking my seizure meds, that due to the residue in my brain, the likelihood that I’ll suffer another seizure hovers around 50%.

50%? Those are not good odds. I have to take this medication for the rest of my life? Huge bummer. But it’s worth it if it means I’m cool and can soon manhandle the Saab through the streets of San Francisco like the champ that I am. Still coming to terms with that.

All of it aside, I’ve stumbled into this new year a changed woman, at least on the inside. Trite but true. I’m really interested to see how things play out where I can flex this newfound love for everything because I welcome it all, including a free trip to Japan that I earned over 10 years of miles accumulated on shit flights on United (winky face, United!!). And get out your barf bags, but once again I need to thank you all for your undying (really) support throughout all of this. Never have I felt more loved, and I mean that.

A highly condensed version of things I wrote to myself to strive for in twenty-ten:

1. Get back into a regular excercise routine, shell of a woman. YOU NEED MUSCLE.
2. Let it roll off your back (that’s how I’m saying ‘don’t sweat the small stuff’ in 2010, shut up it’s totally better)
3. Live your life forward, not backward
4. Love and be loved
5. Go on a date with Jennifer Aniston (where the f was she in 09?)

That’s pretty much it. Happy New Year, universe. Happy to be here, happy to know you all.

Also? I detoxed off lorazepam on my own and no longer take it to calm myself down or fall asleep. Stay in 2009 where you belong, shithead. I DON’T NEED YOU ANYMORE!

Sarah Lane's Tumor Ruin: All Signs Point to No

I got some good news today. Really great news. The kind of exceptional news where afterward your only real choice is to throw some Daft Punk on Pandora, put the headphones in, and just start skipping down the street, smiling at everyone. (I actually did that, btw. If you saw a small, maniacal, skipping woman wearing super cute green/pink Pumas on Fillmore today between Clay and Page, that was me, dawg! And I was smiling at YOU.)

I had my 5th MRI yesterday, the one that was supposed to tell me if my parasitic nightmare and ensuing slightly embarrassing overshare (um, sorry, btw, wow) was all worth it, and if the neurocysticercosis had filed for bankruptcy and foreclosed my house.

And guess what? I met with my new neurologist today, and we went over yesterday’s scans in detail, and…. it looks like my tumors bought in the height of the market, and they thought they were really scoring, and then the bottom dropped out of their neighborhood, rendering them yet another statistic in this national recession of fallen property values.

But seriously, between the radiologist’s and neurologist’s notes, I was told there was “progressive reduction”.. indicating that not only had my tumors already diminished, but that they are expected to continue to.

O, happy, blessed day. Seriously. You don’t get that kind of news every day. I don’t, anyway.

The next step is to meet with a highly specialized infectious disease doctor (I guess they have those and these people spend their entire lives researching people like me, which is rad) and make sure that she doesn’t think I need another round of Albendazole/Prednisone, just to make sure the killers are really truly dead. I guess my particular disease is one that’s still being figured out and the treatment options modified regularly.

Basically I got the best news I could possibly get at this point. If the parasite in my brain that manifested into the tumors that gave me an epilepsy is truly dead or soon to be dead, then if I’m lucky (and I don’t need to be all that lucky since the odds are 80% in my favor), the resulting brain scar tissue from this whole ordeal will stay in my brain, but cease to cause me further issue.

Obviously the whole thing will be closely monitored. For example, I still get the headaches I started getting before my seizure, and that always worries me a little. My neurologist thinks it’s likely residual pain from all that radiation I went through. If anything in that department gets weird, I’ll get looked at. But at this point, I’m considered “on the mend”.

I can’t believe it, and yet I can… because as insignificant and brief my ordeal has been in the grand scheme of human suffering, I consider the entire experience a gift to a vain, materialistic, silly woman like me who really needed a little perspective. It worked, UNIVERSE! GOT IT! I love life and I love being here. It’s all very obvious to me now, and if it’s always been obvious to you, then I’m so happy to belatedly be in the club.