The Chemo Chronicles: No so fast!

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It was Tuesday morning, the day after Day #3, which was lost to post-chemo side effects.

But I felt pretty good on Tuesday. The background headache was gone, the brain fog back to a low level. After getting up early, as usual, I wrote a blog post describing the prior day’s sad tale.

No walk to beach to see the sunrise sunrise, though. I learned that lesson.

After Meda emerged from the bedroom, we had a light breakfast. Then she asked me to troubleshoot why she wasn’t able to use Microsoft Word on her relatively new MacBook Neo.

And that led to an intense and frustrating 45-minutes or so going mano a mano with Microsoft’s almost impenetrable online maze. Meda’s prompt said that she had to subscribe, but I know she shares my paid subscription. I was finally able to maneuver to a page that macknowledged the shared Microsoft 365 account. But when I tried to activate it using the button provided, it would send me right back to the original “buy a subscription” page.

I tried a number of different approaches, none seemed to show promise, and I could feel my energy reserves running down quickly. Mental effort, not physical effort, was starting to drag me down.

I finally broke through and got the job done. But by that time, I was ready for a 45-minute nap that seemed, at the time, to be restorative.

Over the rest of the day, I did a few small tasks.

• Swept up around one of the cat litter boxes that Kiko had happily played in, kicking fresh cat litter out at least two feet on all sides.

• Finished sorting through a stack of old pants, at least a dozen or more, selecting just a few to keep and bagging the rest to give away.

• Did a small wash of my clothes.

• Cleared assort “stuff” out of our car in advance of having it detailed the next day.

Nothing strenuous. I thought I was safe.

But I wasn’t.

By mid-afternoon, I was drained once again. I lost the rest of the day, and the evening, with along night in bed.

Woke up again feeling better, but spooked by how easy it is to try to do “too much.”

A celebratory Feline Friday

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We have a lot to celebrate over the next few days.

Our wedding anniversary, my birthday, and the fact that I’m still here!

But we also have an approaching tropical storm, predicted to soon grow to a hurricane, although it’s looking like a run-in with Mauna Kea will divert it safely south of Oahu and Honolulu, so we should okay.

And, if I’m not feeling too woozy, the muted celebrations can continue, weather permitting.

I caught a couple of sweet pictures this week. One shows Kinikini soliciting Bessie for a few reassuring licks to his forehead. And the other is Bessie asleep in her “nest” on top of a 6-foot storage storage shelf in our pantry/storeroom. The soft light through the window is about perfect!

In any case, it was a week shortened by my loss of two days to post-chemo side effects. I was lucky to get Feline Friday ready to go on time!

Feline Friday: August 14, 2026

The Chemo Chronicles:
I thought I was having a good day

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I didn’t see it coming.

As usual, I was up early on Monday morning. I sat down, drank most of two glasses of water, and felt pretty good looking ahead to the new week.

It was Monday, the start of a new week. I apparently should have paid more attention to the fact that it was Monday, Day 3 after a 4-1/2 hour chemotherapy session with side effects that had not run their course.

Since I was feeling pretty good, not too fuzzy, I picked up my camera, put on my walking shoes, grabbed my cane and a baggie with some small dog biscuits, and headed out to walk down the street to Waialae Beach Park. It isn’t far, about .2 miles to the corner of Kahala Avenue and you’re entering the park. But it’s still the longest walk I’ve been making the past few weeks.

I was quickly greeted by Bono and his person. We chatted while walking across the park toward the ocean. Then I sat and watched the sunrise, getting up a few times for photos. As I was leaving the park, I ran into Makana and his person, and I updated him on my situation. Finally on the walk home, I ran into another acquaintance who lives a block away, and she was concerned and wanted to hear more of my story. And then I heard Bailie barking and had to stop and share a few dog treats with him.

By the time I got home, I was getting tired.

And that’s when I learned something about Day 3 after chemo: feeling good can be a mirage.

I ate a serving of Greek yogurt, enjoyed a cup of decaf coffee.

But before long, I decided to just go back to bed and lie down for a while. After a 40-minute nap, I felt something new, a headache coming on. I got up, took a Tylenol, and went back to bed.

And from there, it was all downhill with the wheels coming off the cart.

The headache started acting like a migraine, with nausea tagging along. So I went to my reserve of pills for nausea. That helped, but the drug also slows down your system, contributing to constipation, which in turn can feed back into the headache.

And by then I was woefully behind on the day’s fluid intake and could never get close to catching up.

By noon I just gave up and gave in. The day was over for me. I never checked email, never let myself peek at the latest bad news. Late in the afternoon, I managed to drink a protein shake, but I’m afraid that was the only sustenance of the day. I just turned on the a/c, cocooned ed myself in a comforter, and dozed fitfully for the next 18 hours.

This morning, I’m moving very cautiously. I’m out of bed and Upright.

And I’m writing these notes as a reminder.

Beware Day #3.

Feeling good first thing in the morning isn’t the final word. Sometimes it’s just a trap drawing you into doing more than your body can handle.

Live and learn.

And go slow.

Case Country isn’t where you think it is.
But Claude quickly got the picture.

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My life change this morning. For the good. And, for regular readers-no, it’s nothing related to my current cancer treatment.

It’s the day after Hawaii’s Primary Election, and normally that involves my spending hours knee-deep in raw text files and legacy database queries.

But today was different. And that’s how the story begins.

In the past, my first task in the morning after an election, even before getting a cup of fresh coffee, would be to visit the Office of Elections’ website and quickly eyeball the tables of election data from the most recently available statewide summary of results. After a quick look through the outcomes of what were expected to be the most contested races, I would then download the text file containing raw precinct-level data also available from Office of Elections.

The next task would be to import the text file into Filemaker, a robust Mac database. My version is about five years old, but perfectly serviceable for my uses.

Once the data was downloaded into Filemaker, I could then begin converting my questions into queries instructing Filemaker how to search through and analyze the data from different directions, breaking it down to precincts or summarizing by electoral districts or neighborhoods looking for patterns. Sometimes I started with specific questions, but lots of times I just wanted to satisfy my curiosity. Occasionally I might share some findings in a post-election blog post, but more often they just provided background understanding to guide my future reporting. And many times I would be stalled out trying to write a query that produced exactly the results I was looking for.

Then the earth moved!

This morning, I skipped the whole text file/download/import/Filemaker process and decided to see how far I could get by simply letting an AI assistant do the heavy lifting.

After downloading the plain-vanilla statewide table of precinct-by-precinct results in pdf format from the elections website, I just uploaded the 498-page data table to Claude, Anthropic’s AI assistant and the dog I chose for today’s hunt.

Claude was immediately ready to rock and roll!

I had been surprised to see how handily Congressman Ed Case had fended off what appeared to be a strong challenge from State Senator Jarrett Keohokalole, and wanted to know more about voting in their head-to-head race.

Working with Claude was seamless. I started asking questions, and Claude began returning clear, detailed answers instantly.

How many districts within Congressional District 1 did Keohokalole carry?

Claude’s answer–None.

Case ran the table, winning every one of the 25 legislative districts that make up the Congressional District 1. Claude did not include the two districts that are split between CD1 and CD2 because they didn’t fit my initial question.

And Claude provided an unexpected takeaway. The areas where Case showed the greatest strength are not where most observers might assume they would be.

Key takeaway: This is a stark geographic story.

Case’s biggest margins over Keohokalole are almost entirely in Leeward and Central Oahu — Waipahu (District 36) crushed it at +40.5 points, followed by Kalihi, ‘Aiea/Halawa, Pearl City, and the Mililani corridor. These are working-class and suburban communities, not Case’s presumed home-turf advantage neighborhoods.

Notably, East Honolulu districts (18, 19, 20) — where you’d expect an incumbent’s strongest home support — only rank #9–12 on this list, with more modest margins (+16 to +20 points) despite being generally considered “Case country.” His dominance was actually strongest in the areas furthest from town.

Only 2 districts (21 and 46, not shown in top 25) had narrower margins below +8 — Case won every single House district in the congressional district, just by varying amounts.

In 1976, I doubt this geographic pattern would have been any surprise, as the leeward area at that time was considered the stronghold of the AJA-generation of Democratic Party organizers credited with the behind-the-scenes grassroots work that powered the party’s rise to political dominance. But the public perception is quite different today, making these findings somewhat startling.

Here are the districts where Case outpaced Keohokalole by the largest percentage margins. The full list can be found here.

I chose Claude for this assignment more or less at random, and I expect other AI assistants would provide more or less similar answers. That’s probably a hypothesis worth testing another day. What I keep coming back to, though, is Waipahu and Leeward Oahu. The strongest support for this four-term congressman considered to be at the more conservative end of Hawaii’s Democratic Party spectrum strongest ground wasn’t in the politically purple districts in East Honolulu — it was in the traditional Democratic Party strongholds from Pearl City to Waipahu. The progressive drift of many Democratic activists appears to carry less sway out thata way.

Twenty minutes with a PDF and an AI assistant got me to that insight almost before I’d finished my coffee. A few years ago, that would have taken me the better part of a morning, if I got there at all.