It Might Get Messy

Eddie Hazel said “I have tasted the maggots in the mind of the universe. I was not offended. For I knew I had to rise above it all. Or drown…in my own shit.” Hazel was the genius guitar player with Funkadelic/P-Funk/George Clinton. In a career eerily parallel to that of Brian Jones, it only took him a few albums to drown in his own pharmacological shit.


On a cool December evening in 1862, a Union army private tried explaining to his comrades his discomfort at walking so easily into Confederate Fredericksburg, Virginia: “Shit, they WANT us to get in. Getting out won’t be quite so smart and easy.” Nor was it. Next day the federals spent hours being slaughtered on the backside of Fredericksburg, attacking up a steep hill into the teeth of the Confederate defensive line.


That same winter and spring, U.S. Grant was “experimenting” with methods for capturing Vicksburg, Mississippi. Before settling, by default, into a summertime siege, he tried 7 separate approaches, ranging from sneaking up quietly at night to re-routing the Mississippi River. Eventually, of course, in 1863 at the same time R.E. Lee was watching the Army of Northern Virginia get shredded in Gettysburg, Sherman was rewarded with the city’s surrender.


And why, exactly, am I dumping these rambling anecdotes on you, my so-patient readers? Well, because of the lesson. Or rather, the extended lesson. 


Which is this. A big chunk of life is just showing up. But sometimes you have to show up repeatedly. And sometimes you have take a repeated beating to get where you need to go. Tomorrow I see Dr. H, my oncology surgeon. It’s an exploration to see if we need to biopsy this painful area on the right side of my mouth, over there at the base of my tongue. The spot is symmetrical with the tumor we hammered out from the left last year. It seems to be growing increasingly sore. Neither Dr. H nor radiologist Dr. N saw anything down there a month ago at my last visit. But they were concerned enough to schedule a quick return.


I’ll let you know the outcome over the weekend. Meanwhile, some midsummer nature photos up over at http://docviper.livejournal.com/, and professional blog still cooking at http://aehsfoundation.org/ . So rock on, all. I know I am!

it Might Get Messy

A year or so ago, when I really did think I was going to die, I melodramatically asked myself what aspects of life I would miss the most. Of course, this made the metaphysical presumption that my dead self would be in condition to “miss” anything, which of necessity means I also bypassed the potential for death to bring a sort of ideal retirement situation, where your noncorporeal essence gets to act as if it had plenty of money and time on its hands. 


Anyway. Among life’s pleasures that I was sure I would “miss” were trips to the beach. The smell of the ocean, the sunset over the sound, that shock the first time every year that your testicles get dunked in the ocean… .


Anyway. It had been years since I’d been to the beach when I hit the emergency room last July, and I thought I’d like to live long enough to do at least one more trip. But before we deal with that nostalgia, let’s consider the potential for snake venoms to contribute to cancer treatment.


Metastasis—spread—is heavyweight among the life-threatening tools in the cancer kit. Tumors at their point of origin are often sublethal or at least slower to kill than tumors that have spread to multiple organ systems. Remember Bob Marley. Cancer of his toe, left untreated spread to his lungs and brain, killing him. 


But metastasis is a tricky thing, if you think about it. Cancer is not (generally) an “infection”, it can’t spread by reproduction and cellular invasion as microbes do. Rather, proteins that induce cells to runaway division have to reach and penetrate tissues in remote anatomical locations. They do this by binding to other proteins on the cell surfaces. Binding proteins called “integrins” are present on the outside of cancer cells, and are thought to be important in metastasis. Snake venoms interfere with integrin functioning (which is also critical in platelet clotting of blood, for example), and researchers hypothesized potential activity in cancer spread. A protein called “contortrostatin” present in copperhead (the north American pit viper, not the Australian elapid) venom interferes with integrin binding by at least some cancer cells [1]. Similar proteins (rhodostomin, found in a southeast Asian pit viper) also inhibit breast tumor vascularization, further constraining cancer activity [2]. These and other venom components are under investigation for cancer treatment potential. 


Which brings us back to the beach. Much as I enjoy parking my butt in the sand and watching the ocean, I love the Outer Banks because it’s about the easiest place I know to catch pit vipers. Specifically cottonmouths. And the thing I found myself missing the most, there in the hospital while the vacuum system kept my throat functionally clear of thick, killer mucous, was the smell of pit viper musk. When the snakes get pissed off (like when you grab them), they expel the thick-scented contents of cloacal musk glands. It’s perfume to a herpetologist.


So I’m thrilled to be back at the beach this year, alive and kicking. And collecting cottonmouths:

And harvesting their venom:

Check over at http://docviper.livejournal.com/ over the next couple of days for the results of some toxicology experiments conducted with venom harvested from Outer Banks cottonmouths earlier in the week. Check professional weblog at http://aehsfoundation.org/ . Most of all, travel safe my friends. I love you all!


[1] http://jnci.oxfordjournals.org/content/93/4/261.full


[2] http://molpharm.aspetjournals.org/content/59/5/1333.full.pdf

It Might Get Messy

Cancer. In my case, having survived, it’s fair to say I lived with the disease itself and its nightmarish aftermath for just past a year and a half. I still struggle with the now more-or-less permanent impacts—lost salivary function, messy voice, dysfunctional (that is, nonexistent) epiglottis, swollen and scarred throat, tongue and sinuses, plugged-to-demolished lymph system, etc. In other words, grateful as I am to be alive and to some degree functional, cancer even when “cured” means ongoing humiliation. Choking on food, swollen face, and worse.

But let’s not go there quite yet. Let’s start with the observation that something on the order of 400 women fought in combat units during the civil war, disguised, more or less successfully, as men. The actual number is difficult to pin down. Evidence shows that even among those discovered, quite a few maintained their secret for a long time [1]. Some were revealed in death, or during treatment for wounds or disease. Others were turned up when taken prisoner. The wackiest cases were pregnancies, some of which went to term before the “problem” was clarified for the doctors. One woman hid her physique for years under a clumsy (and frequently “difficult”) chain-mail corset-like thing [2].

Now. Back to my cancer issues. Having had my feeding tube yanked hours before leaving for Germany, I had prepped for that event by breaking myself from tube-feeding. Which I did by the only means feasible at the time—thick nutritious milk drinks made extra-caloric with a combination of Instant Breakfast and chocolate powder. With the exceptions of a week off in Germany and two weeks off in the Philippines, my diet for the past several months has been milk. Lots of it. On the order of 4 to 5 liters a day. To the point where my urine smells like lactic acid.

Which I can live with. My weight stays up, I feel healthy, and the cold thickened milk soothes my lumpy throat. But here’s the issue. I’m growing breasts. Seriously. They’re not enormous…well, I like to think they’re average for my height, thank you. And shapely. But that’s not the point. The point is I’M GROWING BREASTS.

Which wouldn’t be quite so humiliating except we’ve just embarked for two weeks at the beach. Eliciting periodic necessity to uncover torso. Which torso is now a bit curvy. Although still hairy.

I’m gonna have to cut back on the milk. Or find myself a chain-mail corset-like thing, preferably one that is not “difficult”.

I won’t update http://docviper.livejournal.com/ until the middle of this coming week, to give me some time to get some photos from the Outer Banks for your delectation. In the meantime, don’t forget to check the professional blog over at http://aehsfoundation.org/ . Thanks, all!

Notes

[1] http://www.smithsonianmag.com/history-archaeology/The-Women-Who-Fought-in-the-Civil-War.html

[2] http://www.cevsite.com/civilwomen.htm

It Might Get Messy

The first few days of April 1862, union soldiers camped around a little Tennessee River town called Pittsburgh Landing were jumpy [1]. They heard things at night, saw spooky shadows and ghostly traces in the woods. Their officers laughed and called them sissies. After all, just a couple months before they’d taken both Fort Donelson and Fort Henry, key confederate facilities gumming up Federal activities in the Mississippi Valley. What could go wrong?

They found out early on the 6^th, when 44,000 southern troops started to press the Federals. Things were bloody but even through most of the day, until the confederates finally brought up enough artillery to clear out a stubborn focus of Union resistance in a tightly-grown forest grove known as the Hornet’s Nest. The horrific aftermath of the late-afternoon cannonade was that the union forces were rolled back across the fields and orchards near the tiny Shiloh Church (named by the congregation after the Hebrew word for “place of peace”) to the river banks. Oh, and as the afternoon wore on, it started to rain.

In short, it was a mess. The north got their asses kicked right across the landscape, as a large force of reinforcements kept getting lost on the farm roads and never made the battlefield.

Toward midnight, Ulysses Grant looked for a place to get out of the rain and get some sleep. He tried a little cabin atop the river bluff that had been his headquarters earlier in the day, but it was full of surgeons doing what surgeons did in those days—hacking limbs off soldiers so the infections from where clothing and other crap were forced into wounds by minie balls wouldn’t kill them later. Grant ended up down by the river, under a big oak tree.

William Sherman found him there. Grant was stretched out in his heavy wool coat, hat pulled down over his face so his cigar would stay lighted while he snoozed in the downpour. Sherman said “Been a hell of a day, huh Grant?” Grant opened one eye. “Yeh” he said, “lick ‘em tomorrow, though”. And went back to sleep.

And he was right. The lost divisions of reinforcements showed up, the confederates couldn’t hold the hornet’s nest, and the union mopped up the battlefield on the 7^th.

Without Grant being fully functional for the rest of the war, there’s a fair chance the union wouldn’t have won. And who’s to say that his smoking somewhere north of a dozen cigars a day wasn’t part of what kept him functional in a world where he watched men by the thousands march their faces into the rifles and cannons of other men who shot them down by the thousands?

But those cigars also killed him. As the tumor in his throat grew and he weakened, his doctor had to up his dosage of cocaine during the day and morphine at night. The second volume of his memoirs was a lot more hassle to produce than the first. That tumor shut him down just days after he delivered the manuscript to Mark Twain, who published it and made Grant’s wife financially comfortable where she might have otherwise been nearly destitute [2].

And why am I telling you, my patient readers, this interminable anecdote? Because this weekend I passed a drug-related milestone of my own. Not sure whether it equates to the cigars or the morphine, and either way we would have to assume some conceptual linkage between my life and Grant’s. Perhaps we’d better not go there. I’ll just say that I weaned myself off the last of my Xanax. You get addicted to it over the long haul, so you have to cut down your dosage by chipping up the tablets over time. I took the last quarter tab this weekend.

And I’m sleeping just fine, thank you. Sometimes my throat is painfully swollen in the evening, but a big glass of chocolate milk smooths things out. I may not have any worthwhile memoirs to write. But I’m not gonna die of a massive throat tumor either. And I can keep my head clear of Xanax while scribbling weblogs for y’all!

Thanks for being here, everybody. Check out some Philippines stuff over at http://docviper.livejournal.com/ , next week hopefully we’ll start having some Outer Banks material to post there. Professional blog still running at http://aehsfoundation.org/ . Love you all!

Notes

[1] This story comes from Winston Groom’s excellent Shiloh: 1862, National Geographic Books, 2012.

[2] Waugh, J. 2009. U.S. Grant: American Hero, American Myth. UNC Press, Chapel Hill.