The mysterious appearance of my Drupal feeds on the bottom of my blog entries is a welcome sight. I found it today, in the Triptych region at the bottoms of the pages.
Moving right along, then, I’ll see if I can make it appear on the front page too. I think it’s more useful there.
I also changed the appearance of the blog entries by altering the tag set allowed in Filtered HTML to add the tag. I found that the spacing between paragraphs was not showing up, and I had started to double-space between graphs – but that’s not the way it’s supposed to be done. I have altered tag sets in Drupal 6, so it was not a mystery to me – actually, it’s easier in D7. An improvement! But I’m not sure why the default tag set for Filtered HTML would not include a tag.
I’f you’re listening out there Drupal folks, just a suggestion – include the tag in the default. Everyone should use paragraphs!
Author: Hazel Becker
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Under his skin, in his words
I started to write all the sordid details about Robert’s diagnosis with melanoma because otherwise it feels like starting in the middle. I decided not to write it, though, because his own summary tells the story much better than I could. The following comes from an email that he sent on May 29 to our families and a few friends.
This email is a terribly impersonal way of telling you how our May has gone. It’s not that Hazel or I do not want to talk to you, it’s that we know each of you will have the same questions. So I’ll try to provide the answers, at least the ones we now have.
In April I went to the dermatologist for my periodic inspection, and early in May he removed what appeared to be a sebaceous cyst from the back of my head. It appeared there as a small thing about a year ago and had grown slowly until a few months ago, when it got bigger.
He sent the thing off for a biopsy, and about a week later we learned that the lump was a melanoma. Because I have never had a mole or skin lesion that was diagnosed as a primary melanoma, never had any moles removed, and they could find no place on my skin where a melanoma had been but disappeared, this was diagnosed as metastatic melanoma.
Often, once primary melanomas are removed they don’t recur. Metastatic melanoma is another matter altogether. It’s the most aggressive form of skin cancer, far worse than the squamus cell carcinoma my mother had. For those of you who are blood relatives, that I have melanoma is a risk factor for you. Sorry.
Since then we have been to the melanoma clinics at the Washington Hospital Center and Johns Hopkins. I had a PET/CT, which showed no signs that the thing on my head has spread to any other parts of my body, or that it came from some other place. That’s encouraging, but not a cause for celebration.
The next step is to do what is known as a sentinel node biopsy and replace the skin around the site of the cyst with a graft to make sure no melanoma cells were left behind. For the biopsy they inject dye around the cyst and see which lymph node(s) it travels to. Then they remove and biopsy the node(s) to see if any melanoma cells are present. If none are found that’s very good because that is an indication the melanoma did not go beyond the cyst.
The problem is that they probably will never be able to tell whether I have primary or metastatic melanoma. Although most people who get melanoma initially have a mole or lesion on the epidermis, some people have what is called dermal melanoma, meaning the primary melanoma starts below the epidermis.
All melanoma cells look alike, whether they are primary or metastatic. Therefore, it probably will be impossible to stage mine, making arriving at a prognosis very difficult.
In any event, all agree that I need the sentinel node biopsy and plastic surgery before considering future treatment. I’m seeing the surgical oncologist later this week and probably will have the surgery in 2 or 3 weeks, depending on doctors’ schedules.
There are at least three potential courses of treatment, depending on the results of the sentinel node biopsy. If they find no melanoma in the nodes, an experimental vaccine against the disease is a possibility, followed by regular monitoring. Hopkins and several other research hospitals have trials under way. If they find melanoma cells in the lymph node, chemotherapy with interferon might be advisable. Melanoma can have two genetic mutations, and if mine is one of those the treatment might include growing antibodies that target the specific mutation.
The doctors I’ve seen seem to agree on one thing, my general health is very good. They see that as indicating my melanoma, if it is metastatic, only recently got that way. They also think my body can handle the available treatments.
Again, sorry for doing this in an email. But repeating all of this to each of you, and telling you we don’t know more, is not my idea of fun. We’ll let you know when things become clearer. As I said at the beginning, it is not that Hazel and I do not want to talk to you. We just do not want to waste everyone’s time ruminating unknowns.
P.S. If we’ve already discussed seeing you this summer we plan to be there. If we need to change our plans we’ll let you know.
So, that’s Robert’s story, in his own words.
If you were not among our relatives or friends who received the email, please don’t take that to mean anything about our relationship with you. Your email may have bounced because he didn’t have your current email address in his contact manager. It’s also possible that it got trapped in your spam filter because his subject line was “Tidings” – perhaps because he didn’t want your email listing to have an ominous subject in it, or perhaps because he just couldn’t come up with anything else. I’m willing to cut him some slack at this point, and I’m guessing you are too!
Obviously I have a lot to learn about Drupal7, and today I tried something new, which I haven’t yet done in D6: adding a feed aggregator to my site.
First, a word about how I learn. Generally I’m pretty good at self-paced study, and my provider of choice is Lynda.com. I’ve been using this company’s training videos to learn all sorts of computer skills for several years. I subscribe to the basic service, so I don’t go through the exercises using the files provided with a premium membership. Instead, I try to make up similar exercises on my own site.
You’ll see evidence of my most recent learning experience on this website – or, I should say, you won’t easily find it there! I’m not sure why, or what I’ve done wrong. I’ve aggregated two blogs – one by my Lynda.com instructor for D7 Essential Training, Tom Geller, who blogs about Drupal at www.tomgeller.com, and the other from the Drupal website. Tom’s blog hasn’t been updated since January, so I didn’t get any results there – but even so, he deserves a plug here for all he’s taught me about Drupal!
I succeeded in bringing the Drupal Planet blog in from drupal.org/planet. I tried to configure it in the Bartik theme by placing it in the “Sidebar Second” region – in other words, the right-hand side of the page – but it doesn’t show up there. Then, I tried to put it in the Tryptich region at the bottom of the page. No luck.
Tomorrow is another day … and I’ll spend some time figuring out why my “blogroll” won’t show up where I tell it to. No promises – but in the meantime, if you want to follow this exercise as I add more Drupal blogs (if I can find any), go to http://www.hazelbecker.com/?q=aggregator/categories/1. I hope I’ll be able to make it show up on the Home page soon.
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The best laid plans …
My journey to proficiency with Drupal 7 took a sharp turn today, when I decided I would add some new features to this blog. I will use the Taxonomy feature, a module in D6 but built into Core in D7, to tag posts so that people who don’t want to read about Drupal can easily avoid those posts. I created the taxonomy, which I named Blog Subjects, and added Drupal, Melanoma, and Journalism as terms. Easy – so far so good!
I was going to write about melanoma – my preoccupation these days – and start to tell our story, or at least my perspective on it. Even before I started writing, though, I thought it would be good to have the ability to tell that story, for the time being, to just the people I’m writing it for – in other words, not make it available to the entire WWW. In D6 you do that by using a module called Node Access, which gives authorized users a Grant tab allowing them to restrict access on a node-by-node basis.
Sharp turn – because the Node Access module is not yet ready for prime time in D7! I took it for granted that I would have all the functionality on this new site that I have on my other Drupal sites. I discovered that an alpha version of the module is available for D7 but it’s not recommended for production sites. Perhaps there’s a way to do this using core functions of D7, but if so it’s not intuitive.
I have two options –
· forget about it and brave the public, or at least write for a while and see who pays attention; or
· find a work-around that will allow me to restrict access to some subjects I address in this blog.
For the moment, I’m looking for a work-around. Soon, I’ll get around to writing about melanoma.
Now, I’m off to figure out how to apply a taxonomy to my blog posts. I hope you’ll see the results of that quest soon.
I was inspired by my BNA colleague John Schappi’s blog, “Aging and Parkinson’s and Me,” to start this blog. Like John’s blog, mine will be a personal website where I will share what’s going on in my head – whether about the health topics that are raging in there right now; or website design and implementation using Drupal, an open-source content management system that is being employed to produce this website; or journalism, retirement, grandparenthood, or any other subject that pops in there from time to time.
I’m using a new Drupal 7 website to produce this blog, as a vehicle to learn about the latest release of the website production system I’ve been using for the last few years. Eventually I’ll move my business website, now appearing in Drupal 6 at www.by-words.com, into Drupal 7 at this URL (www.hazelbecker.com) as an archive of my work as a publication consultant and freelance writer, and possibly as an active business site. I’ve set up the site (with installation help from my husband, Robert) and begun to design it. I will likely write about my D7 learning experience on this blog, and I’ll tag those posts “drupal” so that those of you who have no interest in this subject will know to ignore that post.
My impetus for beginning a blog right now has been change. The first domino to fall was Robert’s diagnosis with metastatic melanoma, which I found out about on May 14. I will write more about this experience in other posts, but for now let me just say that this discovery was transformative. I know that others who are close to cancer survivors understand how this transformation might have played out. For those who are interested in knowing more, I’ll write some blog posts and tag them “melanoma.”
After the initial diagnosis, and facing work deadlines for two stories due June 1, I found that I couldn’t concentrate – my quest for knowledge about melanoma was all that my brain could handle. Knowing that we would be facing challenges over at least the next few months, including periods of uncertainty and discovery, I decided to stop working, at least for the time being. I may change my mind after things settle down here – however that happens – but for the moment I consider myself “retired.” If I decide to write more about this change in my life, I’ll tag those posts “retirement.”
So, I’ll start my D7 blog with three taxonomy terms. I plan to build the site a little before I invite my family, friends, and colleagues to sign up. If all goes well, I’ll set it up with enough flexibility that people who want updates pushed to their inboxes can sign up for them. For the moment I’ll keep it all behind a curtain since Robert isn’t ready to “go public” with his health status.
And with this, my new project is launched.