It Might Get Messy


But not as messy as it might be. In another universe, my life ended decades ago on a hot sunny day in a rice paddy in South Vietnam. 


That universe is not so far, probabilistically, from this one. I’m pretty sure I’ve been there. Sometimes late at night I feel that warm water—just a couple inches deep—on the right side of my face. My nose is out of the water, against a muddy bank overgrown with wiry grass. I smell the mud—it’s clean, not anoxic, highly organic, promising a good season’s growth. But not for me. That warm, fragrant wetland smell is embedded deep in my subconscious. There is something eternal about it. It’s part of the greater complex of universes that this one is a slice of. 


I’ve been watching an excellent series of films National Geographic has compiled on the Vietnam War. Have you seen any of it? When the narrative begins each episode, you think it’s going to be another yahoo revisionist attempt to justify that idiot episode in history, and there is some of that. But the writers catch themselves every time, and end up telling largely the truth—partly because about half the time is spent on interviews with survivors, and that perspective—whatever it is for each individual—is truth by definition.


I wonder what the difference is between that universe—where I am dead before I’m 30, before my parents, without kids of my own and before my life was really engaged—and this one, where, I’ve hung on long enough to contract a life-threateningly acute cancer and fight it to a standstill. 


I suppose the easy—and most likely—answer is nothing. There is no imperative, no endpoint, no direction, no morality to reality, and a richer universe (at least from my perspective and the perspective of those I’ve known and will know) has no more inherent value than a poorer one. 


But I’m not sure I buy that. I’ve come to envision a spectrum of consciousness that is inherent in matter—in being in general—and is not unique to life. Think about it. The earth is “conscious” of the moon and the sun via gravity and radiation. Qualitatively, that is not particularly different from our intellectual consciousness that works off the same basic forces and processes it through an additional mental network of electromagnetic and chemical signal management infrastructure. If that’s true, then life may just be one middling endpoint in a never-ending seeking by “being” versus “nothingness” to acquire, configure, and disperse energy at the greatest possible rate (Ilya Prigogine’s hypothesis that evolution is an endeavor to disperse ever greater quantities of energy). I’m not, ultimately, certain why or how that “desire” should be built into the laws of physics. But if it is, at least it gives a direction, focus, and meaning to being.


And what that means is, that learning—acquisition of understanding—is the simple imperative of life. Could be worse. Let’s learn something about the infrastructure of the human throat. 

I slurped the above anatomical diagram from the web. Note the relative placement of the trachea—pipeline to the respiratory system—esophagus—pipeline to the gastrointestinal system—and the epliglottis—gateway to both. That nexus is a focal point of my present difficulties.


Nurse Bethany, agent of the GBMC study of swallowing in throat cancer patients, is the best for many reasons. Not least, she sent me a nice series of stills from my last project appointment. 

Look just to the left of my spinal column. The dark rectangular mass at the base of my tongue is a glug of thin liquid dyed with the barium tracer. The dark trickle running down parallel to my spine into the dark nether regions of my chest is the little bit of liquid that my damaged epiglottis lets slide down the “wrong” pipe, into my trachea. This is apparently classic for people in my condition and is often problematic. It seems odd that I, who wrestled with acute asthma, bronchitis, and pneumonia for decades should have no fallout from this rain of superfluous liquid into my breathing apparatus. But my mucous membranes and affiliated ranks of cilia seem to deal with it just fine. I have had no respiratory issues to date. 

The image immediately above shows the black bolus of a pudding-textured formulation of imaging compound, smeared on a cracker. I bit off a corner, chewed, and swallowed. The swallow was largely ineffective. That black bolus is post-swallowing, stuck right at the entrance to my throat. 

Here you can see that the food blockage is broken up. Nurse Bethany’s given me a sip of water, and that has helped mobilize the goop and let it slide down my throat. 


Apparently, there is no way to know at the moment whether the damage to my epiglottis is permanent. Bethany says sometimes it is, sometimes it isn’t. But, in her experience, people who have the inflamed mess that I retain from the radiation therapy eventually heal to swallow and speak close to normal and with little discomfort. I sure as hell hope so. I’m certainly chronically uncomfortable at the moment!


Hopefully we've all done our part to pump more highly ordered energy into the Big Black by learning this bit about human throat functioning in general and my own contretemps in particular. Hell, since we've made that contribution, I suggest we collectively take the rest of the week off to relax and play some good music. 


Anyway, thank you all for being here. I have not updated any of the other web logs in this suite, for that I apologize. We spent the weekend moving Colin into his apartment in Atlanta adjacent to the Georgia Tech campus, so I’m a little behind. But I treasure these blogs, and I am deeply grateful for all of you who schlep over to read this stuff. I’ll post a notice here when I update the other three sites. Have a good week, all. Oh. Next week should be pretty cool. I go for my pre-operation PET scan on Thursday. Hopefully I’ll have some images of any residual malignancies and the ongoing horrific inflammation that I’m still fighting. Rock on, all!