Yeah it sucks. I should be hang-outable soonish, though, if you're not out on tour.

I've also been blogging the experience over at https//superbon.net and will be posting links to new posts here. The cancer blog has been running on and off since 2009 so if you select the "cancer" category, you get the full narrative if you read from the beginning.

My partner flew out, my local friends have looked after me, and the Radcliffe people have been great. My department even bailed me out of a big bureaucratic task (yes, I'm on leave but you can't TOTALLY abandon your job). I've been doing my physical therapy and rehabbing all I can.

We start me on new drugs. But now my lungs are messed up. I need supplemental oxygen. I'm totally reconditioned for things like walking up stairs. And of course the new meds have side effects.

The shortness of breath gets bad enough that I am hospitalized twice. The second time I go in via ambulance and let me tell you, I have never been sicker. I wind up in the cancer ward, where I'm told my cancer has morphed into "high grade metastatic thyroid cancer BRAF-600 mutation."

Except the concussion symptoms seem to be coming back. Then, I start noticing I'm short of breath. I've had a rare kind of metastatic thyroid cancer for 15 years, and it's been controlled with medication. I had a CT scan August 25th right before I left and my oncologist says "go have a great year."

In late August, I arrive in Cambridge MA to join a group of 50 fellows at the Radcliffe Institute. My partner and I are temporarily living apart because she has the same deal as me but at Stanford for the year. We'll talk every day and visit. No problem, right?

...and it did eventually get better. I still sometimes notice sensitivity to certain kinds of lighting and a touch of hyperacusis, but it's not like it was. All good right? Time to go on a much-needed sabbatical, right? Um....

That evening, I am walking down the street and a branch falls on my head. I felt a little woozy, then fine, then three weeks later the concussion symptoms hit hard. That killed my winter semester. I followed the "exposure therapy" protocol with an osteopath and physical therapist...

This year I'm not in Montreal, I'm in Cambridge MA at the Harvard Radcliffe Institute. Which is wonderful. Unfortunately, 2024 has been a rough medical year for me, which I'll tell share more about tomorrow.

I also edited the Sound Studies Reader, which is getting a little long in the tooth. I'm signed up to do a second edition but am debating whether I'll be able to do it. www.routledge.com/The-Sound-St...

My third book is Diminished Faculties: A Political Phenomenology of Impairment, which does what it says on the tin--it tries to rethink the concept of impairment. It came out during the pandemic, so can I say that the fatigue chapter was a "sleeper hit"? www.dukeupress.edu/diminished-f...

The conceit of MP3: The Meaning of a Format is that it's a 100-year history of what was then a 19-year-old format. It sets then-contemporary debates about mp3s against a long media history of compression, formatting, and circulation. There is a cat chapter. www.dukeupress.edu/mp3