It Might Get Messy

Information. Obviously important. Like, critically, vitally, fundamentally important. As important as time, space, matter, and energy. Because if you have time, space, matter and energy without information, you got goop. And goop, in general, ain’t helpful.

But if you got goop, you got the goods. All you need is some information. With a little bit of organization that time, space, matter and energy smoothy you’re looking at becomes…well, a universe. Functional, alive, complicated, beautiful, horrific. In brief, OUR universe.

It was hard for the South to lose the battle of Gettysburg. Robert E. Lee had the right troops, at the right time, in just about the right place. There was some squishiness in that definition of “right place”. The Federals actually held most of the high ground, such as it was, in the rolling farmlands of southern Pennsylvania. But there were weren’t very many of them, and they weren’t very well led. If the armies were blue and gray goop, all Lee needed was a little information to organize HIS goop into the winning blob.

In the 1860s, military information was generated by cavalry. People on horses could ride out farther and faster than other people could walk, count the walking people and their weapons, and ride back with that information. The kind of information Lee needed to massage his goop into the winning blob was that the Federals on Little Round Top and Cemetery Ridge were, at that moment, loosely connected groups of men from multiple commands with little understanding of what needed doing and even less of their part in the doing. In short, with the basic information a simple cavalry engagement would generate.

Only he didn’t have such information. Via a series of what in retrospect can only seem like a far-less-than-improbable cascade of bad military dealings, Lee’s cavalry, including units led by both his son and nephew under the command of J.E.B. Stuart, were out in the hinterlands around Gettysburg (and if you’ve ever been to Gettysburg, you’ve pretty much seen for yourself that it’s all hinterlands) doing nothing particularly productive. And leaving Lee blind to the fact that the federals were, for the moment, militarily impaired.

You know the rest of that story. The Confederates went back south of the the Rappahannock and Potomac rivers, the Union clumsily if persistently hammered on them until they had to surrender at Appomattax.

So information is good. The more information you have, the better. The easier it is to make right decisions. The easier it is to avoid getting your ass kicked at a place like Gettysburg where you should have been the one kicking ass.

This information phenomenon applies to cancer as well. The past two weeks you’ve seen the graphics on which medical decisions are being made as was speak that will determine whether or not, and how well in the former case, I live. The initial information was not promising. The PET scan showed a white-hot spot in my throat where cellular metabolism was racing, converting sugar to ATP and busting it back to ADP in an almost frantic exposition of life. And the MRI, more subtle, with far better resolution, convinced the radiologist there was a visible structure correlated with that hot spot. Hell, I thought I saw it myself.

To his credit as a professional and for sticking to his guns, Dr. H never saw it. Never thought there was a tumor there. And the news this week? Well, on Friday last they put me under and cut me up. You saw the slashed-away spots on my throat. All that meat went off to the lab. And all of it…every single shred…came back negative. No cancer. I have a metabolically active rough spot in my throat, its coherence enhanced now by having been hacked away with scalpels and extractors. But that’ll heal. I can add chicken nuggets and ice cream to my milk shakes, and get back to swallowing as best I’ll be able to. We’ll have to track it closely, because it IS a suspect bit of physiology, sitting there cooking in otherwise benign throat tissue.

But for now, we know this. It’s not cancerous. I am tumor free. I am back in the real world, with all the real problems of earning a living, crafting a family, and growing into something I want to be. But what I am NOT is fighting a carcinoma.

Once again I thank you, my friends. For sticking with me all this way. I love you all. And, it seems, I’m gonna be around to keep on loving you for some time yet to come!!!