Erik MH:

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About the “Mordor” project

I men­tioned in my first post 1 The ref­er­ence to “my first post,” of course, means the first post on my can­­cer-focussed Pos­tHope blog. The link here on this site is to that same post, but migrated to this offi­cial blog at erikmh.org. that I named this site Walk­ing into Mordor only par­tially for the obvi­ous reas­on — that in fact I’m also spend­ing this time on a non-meta­phor­ic­al Mordor-related project.

If all goes well, I will (finally!) be pub­lished, if only in the form of one chapter. The book, entitled Tolki­en and Lit­er­ary World­build­ing, is being edited for Walk­ing Tree Pub­lish­ers by Dr. Thomas Honeg­ger and Dr. Dimitra Fimi.…

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“Eat­ing” through a tube

Medical IV pole bearing a “Kangaroo” pouch of “food,” and a pump
You can see from the photo that I’m rel­at­ively port­able even when connected.

So it occurred to me that perhaps some of you know as little about tube-feeding as I did a few weeks ago, and that you might be curious.

Medical IV pole bearing a “Kangaroo” pouch of “food,” and a pump
You can see from the photo that I’m rel­at­ively port­able even when connected.

I’m eating a little solid food now — more than I was last month, in fact, because they widened my esophagus a bit during surgery in August, and perhaps also because the radiation is ensmallenating the tumor, too....

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No news is good news…

Well, things have been quiet here this week in Lake Wobegon….

Really quiet, in a way, though my dear friend Andy came up from Boston for the week­end to shake things up a bit (hi, Andy!). It was good to get the men­tal juices flow­ing again: Andy helped re-shelve piles of books in the lib­rary — which was very wel­come! — but even more he acted as a ter­rif­ic sound­ing board to help me fig­ure out pri­or­it­ies for the Mordor pro­ject and for work­ing out backup con­tin­gency plans for vari­ous oth­er Tolki­en-related things I’ve been doing (a few of which are spelled out at Ver­mont Soft­works).…

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The radi­ation lab

A medical physicist stands to the left of a Varian particle accelerator at Central Vermont Medical Center; a therapy bed is in the foreground
Vari­an lin­ear accelerator

This actu­ally is the radi­ation machine. I lie on the bed (left), which is rolled into place. I’m pretty sure that the low cen­ter “draw­er” extends out when it’s in oper­a­tion, and that that’s what orbits around my body dur­ing the two- to three-minute session.…

**UPDATE 2017-09-14: No, I had it com­pletely wrong! …

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Sam

‘But you’ve left out one of the chief char­ac­ters: Sam­wise the stout­hearted. “I want to hear more about Sam, dad. Why didn’t they put in more of his talk, dad? That’s what I like, it makes me laugh. And Frodo wouldn’t have got far without Sam, would he, dad?”’ — The Lord of the Rings, §4.08.065

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