My apologies for the selfish and personal nature of this post. I hope you will forgive me given the circumstances. As most of you know, I was diagnosed with stage 4 colon cancer in 2013.

One of the things my wife and I are trying to do is put together some information about my career that will hopefully give my 6 year-old daughter a better sense of who I was as an adult. She knows me as “dad”, but when she gets older she’ll be curious about who I was to my peers and colleagues.

I’ve spent more than a decade in the WordPress community and I’d like to request that you to share a few thoughts or remembrances about me that we can compile and share with her when the time is right.

If we have crossed paths or if I have managed to do something that you found helpful, I’d love it if you would take a few minutes to write it down and send it to me or my wife: heatherkingcom@gmail.com. If you’re willing to have the story shared publicly, please indicate that accordingly. By default, we will keep everything confidential.

This post is part of the thread: Cancer – an ongoing story on this site. View the thread timeline for more context on this post.

I’m nearly through my first cycle of the new clinical trial and overall I think it’s gone pretty well. I was able to get the 6 pills/day (3 in the morning, 3 in the evening) without too much concern. That said, by the end of the 5 days taking the pills I would basically sleep for the day.

During the 2 weeks off without pills (I’m currently on the second week of this) I’ve still had some fatigue and I’m still on the oxygen tank. However I’ve been able to get back to reading to Caitlin and doing Lego sets with her. The cough that I’d developed during by washout period before the trial has improved a bit and I think there has been a slight reduction in some of the visible tumor growth.

I’m still pretty limited as to what I can do physically, but I’ve enjoyed hanging out on the couch during visits from friends and family. Luckily there is plenty of golf, baseball, and now football on TV to keep me busy on the couch.

I don’t yet know when I’ll be scheduling my next CT scan to check the effectiveness of the treatment, but I’m guessing it will be in the next 4-6 weeks.

We’ve also started to try to compile a bit of information about me that Caitlin might find interesting later down the road. If you haven’t received an email about this effort, you probably will in the near future.

This post is part of the thread: Cancer – an ongoing story on this site. View the thread timeline for more context on this post.

I can definitely see this being valuable for travel, but my current use case is my bedside table. The charger happily accommodates my iPhone, iPad, and Apple Watch charging cables, plus a micro USB cable for my Kindle and bluetooth headphones with a port to spare. A single box is much easier to manage than individual wall-to-USB warts for each cable/device.

1. An improved Gallery feature, including support for WordPress shortcode galleries. If you’re uploading photos directly to your gallery post, you can use drag and drop to set the order for them now.
2. The Post Formats admin UI is now responsive and works great on mobile devices.
3. Remove the Social plugin from the theme (requested by WP.org) – it can still be installed separately.
4. Make tons of misc. code changes to match new coding standards vs. previous coding standards (and pass the theme check).

I was originally hoping to have the modified theme hosted on WordPress.org but after weeks of waiting for review, they responded that features of the theme like choosing colors and post formats should be done in separate plugins instead. This makes no sense to me as these are core features of the theme, but happily there are great places like GitHub that will host the project for us.

The Personal theme is quite assuredly mobile-friendly, which makes it a great fit for the importance Google’s is placing on mobile-friendly sites lately.

You can download from the releases page on GitHub or, for you technically minded, grab the reop with git. Just make sure to also grab the submodules.

git clone git@github.com:alexkingorg/wp-personal.git
cd wp-personal
git submodule update --init --recursive

This post is part of the project: Personal Theme. View the project timeline for more context on this post.

That liberating feeling when you let a domain expire for that project you never quite got around to.

#

Still going strong, especially if there is a ball in front of her to chase.

I’m increasingly using Chrome because Safari can’t get the job done. I don’t know whose fault it is that these sites don’t work with Safari, but to me as a user it doesn’t really matter. Improving power efficiency is great, but it would probably save even more battery life if Safari were compatible enough that I didn’t have to keep Chrome running.

#

On Friday afternoon I had my initial interview for the TAS-102 trial. As is standard with these appointments, we reviewed my history, the treatment schedule, side effects (they sound relatively mild), and I signed the consent form to volunteer for the study. From there I needed to get blood work and a CT scan to establish my starting baseline. I was able to get these done and I started the new trial drug yesterday.

The schedule for this trial is a little complicated. It’s a pill rather than an infusion.

Week 1 & 2: take 3 pills in the morning and 3 pills at night for 5 days, then 2 days off
Week 3 & 4: off week – no pills

However, there was one wrinkle. At the beginning of my appointment they took my vitals (height, weight, pulse, blood pressure, and oxygen levels). My oxygen level was too low; below 90 (which supported my anecdotal feelings of shortness of breath, etc. of late).

I called Kaiser and they recommended I go to Urgent Care since it was Friday at 5pm by then. We did so, but ended up at a facility that only offered Urgent Care on Saturday and Sunday. They gave me an oxygen tank and instructed us to go to the ER – basically the nurse said I was risking brain damage because of the low oxygen levels.

So off we went to the ER. My mom was staying with me this past week while Heather and Caitlin were visiting Heather’s family in Minnesota, so she was the lucky one that got to chauffeur and accompany me on this adventure.

At the ER I did my best to convince them to just give me the referral necessary for the oxygen. We were already planning to schedule the CT scan and blood work for this week, so I figured doing as little as possible at the ER was probably best. However, the ER doctor was concerned about blood clots as a potential cause of the low oxygen and wanted to run some blood work as well as a CT scan. I relented, with the caveat that we also do the CT scan I needed for the trial baseline.

The results were as expected: no clots or anything, the cause of the low oxygen was due to “progression of disease” – additional growth in the masses in my lungs.

We were able to get home just before midnight, and the folks that do the home oxygen set-up came over that night to give me a basic kit: a unit for the house with 50 feet of tubing so I can roam around like we did back in the day before cordless telephones. They returned the next day to give us portable oxygen tanks and a unit to refill them as well.

So yeah, our Friday night was pretty awesome!

I had originally hoped to get started on this trial a few weeks ago, but as it turned out my “washout” period (time off from any treatment) ended up being a bit longer than I’d hoped while we waited for a slot to open in the trial. This has giving my fast growing cells a chance to start coming back (including the ones we don’t want). The shortness of breath has been bothering me for a week or so now and my hair started coming back in earnest around the same time.

Hopefully, now that I’m on the trial we’ll get some reduction in the masses in my lungs (as we have in the past) with a matching improvement in my oxygen levels.

Side effects-wise, the new trial shouldn’t cause hair loss like the last one did and my returning hair is coming in much darker than the hair I lost. Maybe it will lighten up again over time. The doctor told me to expect some nausea, and I did have some yesterday in my first dosage. I took an anti-nausea pill for the evening at that seemed to make things better.

So I’ve made it onto the trial – send good wishes for effective results and manageable side effects.

This post is part of the thread: Cancer – an ongoing story on this site. View the thread timeline for more context on this post.

Beyond the technical skills, however, Fintan seems to have a knack for asking interesting questions, a trait that can be harder to find than the ability to answer them.

I’m not at all surprised at how RedMonk went about their latest round of hiring. Sounds like they have landed a great fit. Congrats all around.

#

#

#

I’ve been meaning to stop the car and take this photo for years; finally did it. I might try it again with more focus on the broken down stone structure on the left side.

I liked the fence here – ended up being right next to where we parked by the side of the road.

The idea of an entrepreneur is to ideally build a company that is bigger than the founder. In the early days you are critical, but over time your job is to build systems and hire people (or teams of people) to fill in these critical roles. In many ways the true measure of success is when you’ve managed to make yourself no longer a necessary piece.

I often said that my job at Crowd Favorite was to make myself redundant. And then to build redundancy into the team, processes, etc.

#