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Good news. I managed to eat some pasta with cheese out of the oven today. Granted - it was more cream and salt and veggies than pasta, and it was a tiny portion and it grew stone cold before I was finished, but I did eat it. A year ago, I'd have called this sort of food something valuable and lost from the past.

With food, it's weird at the moment. Basically, I have my mental list of about half a dozen things that I can eat.

Every once in a while, a thought happens in my mind that something was yummy a long time ago / that something might just work now, perhaps.

Then I think about it for a week or longer, sometimes walking past it in the store, looking at it. Mostly deciding that it won't work or will be disgusting anyway.

After these long ponderings, I may acquire this object a while later anyway; prepare it how I have thought about how it may work now (for instance: buns with cheese are a no-no, but if I soften up the bun with milk and mix it up with an egg and fry it, I can somewhat have a bun with cheese), and at the moment, I experience the surprise that it works indeed quite a few times.

Of course, with disappointments. Chips (that's crisps for the UK people) taste like cardboard paper. The formerly yummy bun with tomatoes+mozzarella from the bakery required a lot of oil and a frying pan and tasted like meh anyway. There are insane amounts of salt and pepper and oil that have to be added into everything.


Oh yeah, and "sweet" is still gone out of my life. A neighbour gave me a chocolate easter egg today. :( I don't know what to do with that one. Rubbish bin or give it to someone else, I guess.

Yo.

Things are improving. I've discovered, for instance, that I can eat half a portion of microwave french fries; if I add my extremely fatty dip sauce, that is. And they don't taste totally crappy, and they're getting better at aiming at the esophagus instead of into the trachea. Black olives also work, and they even work as a snack. That is: YES: I actually eat asides from the 1 evening meal/day now. Occasionally.


Anyway. There's something that upset me a few days ago, immensely that is.

You guys know that I had a neck dissection, right? A "modified radical neck dissection type I", to be precise. Left side is now missing: submandibular saliva gland, vena jugularis, musculus sternocleidomastoideus, some more tiny muscles between thyroid glands and clavicula/jawbone. As well as all subdermal fatty issue and all the lymph nodes they could grab.

This leads to some problems with holding the head upright (especially if the bus driver uses the brakes vigorously), and with raising the head when lying on the ground - situps are so much fun now. Also some other disability issues with some exercises. Turning/rotating the head is clumsy.

And it looks bad, due to the asymmetry and due to the fact that you can now see my arteria carotis in plain sight. This is what idiot chicks in the bus tend to stare at, especially in summertime when I flaunt it by wearing short sleeves and cleavage.

So. Right. I'm getting used to it.

Up until 2 months ago, the entire region of the skin was totally numb. Now the prickling, pinching and twitching has seen some successes. First, I had a sudden excruciating pain in this area, when walking around outside in the snow. Some Novalgin helped.

Last week, I experienced the same in the office. No Novalgin available there.

The pain was as if you have a cramp in some muscle. Alright? AS IF, I am not thinking that I actually had a cramp. Because the pain was just outside of my skin. Precisely where normal people have a sternocleido. Phantom pain / missing limb pain, I suppose. It went away after a few hours.

Right.

I also thought that it was the normal way neck dissections in cancer cases like this were done - I see plenty of people without sternocleido(s) in the tumor check-ups.


So, my natural first move was to go into the tongue cancer survivor group (that's in an internet forum; I don't know any of them personally) and ask them about what they do with their phantom pains in the missing sternocleidos. I also mentionend that it felt "like a cramp".


Apparently, most people get a type III neck dissection, not a type I.

The first answers were incredulous. "What? Your sternocleido was removed?? WHY IS THAT???" - or "Are you SURE???" - or "You must be MISTAKEN!" - or even "If you have a cramp in the muscle, then the muscle can't have been removed!" (WTFFF)



I'm feeling like a leper amongst lepers currently. The freak among the freak show.

Finished her title progress last week.

Then I started to go a bit for her black moa chick - hadn't done this at all on this character yet, except for collecting all the ingredients. But Sorrow's Furnace is boring.

Anyway... I scrolled through my characters, tried to play the "Ranger without Xunlai Storage access" for a short while and didn't like the ranger gameplay immediately.

Then I noticed a male Tyrian mesmer who had achieved "Legendary Defender of Ascalon", and I decided that it's time to pull him out of the guildhall, and back into the early stages of Prophecies. He's unique, as in "he has actually got whiteish skin and matching hair instead of following the 'drow' look", and he's named after one of my cats. He just hit "survivor [1]" by doing Augury Rock and has 75% of Tyria explored. I grabbed Mox for him as soon as he hit L.A. (Mox ran a dervish build for the shortest of times, and is now working as a SoS spirit spammer with Union, Shelter, sometimes Displacement, sometimes a Mend Body And Soul). And for the Crystal Desert, when Alesia became more trouble than tolerable on a survivor who returned from a GW-break, I grabbed Ogden (heals) and Vekk (since I've got no use for an elementalist, he pretends to be an illusionist.)

Nice, so far.

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Oh yeah, I also noticed that my oldest mesmer girl (the one wearing black rogue armor) somehow turned into a legendary survivor over night. Her "/deaths" say that she has died over 1400 times, but has received 1,9mio XP after the last death. I have no idea how that happened, but it makes her another option to play with after I gotten bored or finished with this Julian.

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Account-wide achievements look somewhat bleak.

Maxed:
- Lucky
- Unlucky
- Treasure Hunter
- Kurzick

Not Maxed:
- Luxon (~1mio out of 10mio)
- Wisdom (~6,1k out of 10k)

Maybe I'll switch my guild (not that any of the members would care, lol) over to Luxon and grind 9mio Luxon points, buuuut.... do I really want that? Having newborn characters "Kind of a Big Deal" would be kinky though. And it would relieve the pain that is:
- Dzagonur (Guardian of Elona + Legendary Guardian)
- Cartography of Cantha, and perhaps Tyria now as well (no more necrotic traversal in Dunes of Despair)

Yeah well, I don't know.

Wow...

Soooo... that mob in Alkali Pa(i)n seems to be there always. Just east of the area south of the mesmer boss, it is wandering about. I had Frozen Soil (3 points in Wilderness Survival) on Xandra, this time, left her out of the jundundu and let her keep it up. The tricky part was to be sure that the mob was in the radius of the Frozen Soil. Did work flawlessly on the 2nd attempt with this strategy (we wiped 1x first, and thanks to the FS spirit, no junundu-wail + DP accumulation on part of the heroes!). We wiped on the 2nd attempt one time again as well, but we had all of the cavaliers and acolytes down at that point. So I left the remaining mesmers, necros and rangers wander about.


Dzagonur worked on today's first attempt. (I am not really awake yet).

Xandra (Spiritspam) and Razah (some restoration with Union and Life) were with the 3 NPC groups at the eastern side.

Olias, MoW, Tahlkora, Ogden, Norgu and me with Backfire instead of Powerspike (no idea if that was necessary, but it worked) defended the rest.

Now, the thing is really that new mobs only spawn once the previous mob has been totally defeated. By leaving lone rangers about, you get a lot of breathing time. Also, I positioned my group right next to where I expected General Dorian to spawn while some minions kept hitting on that last lonely ranger: Instant-aggro of Dorian = very fast disarming of his spawning point!

It was a tiny bit hairy when because we had also aggroed some of his Margonite friends while more kournans came running down the hill already, but the NPCs of the center of the map distracted them from capping.

I then went for the Monk General and he instantly got his Spellbreaker up, but a group of Kournans without such protection against my group appeared and stood next to him, involving him in their Panicked state. No issues there.

I got the Paragon General before his next group of Kournans could spawn, he was eager to trigger Norgu's Inepti and my Empathy.

Xandra and Razah needed a bit encouragement to spam their spirits during the course of the mission, but their Shelter, Union and Life definitely helped to keep their NPCs alive and well against a large amount of red dots.

And then my entire group helped them and it was over quickly.


Soooo..... no more worries that Nefertari will be stuck at 29/30 titles.

This was my 3rd attempt at this mission since my cancer diagnosis. 1st was when I took the Zaishen bounty at some time in the fall of 2011, then another attempt yesterday, and today it worked with some slight modifications (i.e. don't place the minionmaster to the east - place the spiritspammer there and take the minionmaster with your own group! And some minor skill changes on Razah's skillbar.)