Not as messy as if the Mayans, the Egyptians, Nostradamus, the Greeks, the Romans, the Rosicrucians, the Martians, the Alien, the Predators, the Blob, He, She, It, Them, The Thing, and the giant terrorizing rabbits (!) from “Night of the Lepus” were right and we’d vaporized on 21 December last week. But still sloppy, if not apocalyptic.
When I was in school (and I was in school for a long time), I lived one year in a communal house with a doctoral candidate who had dedicated his Master’s thesis to Marshall McLuhan. In fact, his introduction said something like “this thesis should be considered an appendage to the work of Marshall McLuhan.”
I read a bunch of McLuhan when I was a kid, and I was never really sure what his “work” actually was. As a semi-impoverished academic in an obscure field (usually described as “philosophy of communication theory”), my impression was that he spent most of his time hustling for enough income to support himself and his family. Still, the man who told us "the media work us over completely…so pervasive are they in their personal, political, economic, aesthetic, psychological, moral, ethical and social consequences that they leave no part of us untouched, unaffected, or unaltered” has to be given his due. Especially since he divined that in 1967. I’m sure he’d be apoplectic here in the 2010s, where corporate interests are shared among weapons manufacturers, mass media, news reporters, news makers, drug makers, political powers, and those who set policy for all that and more.
Nor was I sure how a guy who’s master’s was kind of a think-piece essay on advertising theory fit into a school of oceanography. Turns out in general that he didn’t, and he eventually drifted into computing and IT. Go figure. I’m still grateful to him, though. He was one of the few people who understood that physiological constraints of my chronic asthma could be bypassed by preparing marijuana as ingestible brownies.
Anyway. One of the things McLuhan would be useful for, were he still around, would be to help us sort out how generational growth and accumulation affect media. Specifically, a line like “Just when I think I’m gonna make it out…they…pull...me…back…in”. The line is actually from the third Godfather film. But it’s been a standard since then when a movie quote was warranted, and was especially favored in TV series The Sopranos. So what you have now is a line that one generation thinks is from the Sopranos, one missed and just has to muddle through, and one older one that knows it from its actual source.
Am I overthinking this? It just seems like something that would have interested McLuhan.
Anyway, I used that line the other night because I now suspect that this new growth that Doctor H spotted down in my throat actually may be a problem. Last time we did this (what, 6, maybe 8 weeks ago?), I had a painful sore in my throat. The pain subsided the morning Doc H did the biopsy, and the biopsy, despite Dr H’s pessimism (he told Cathy and Molly he was pretty sure it was malignant) was negative. This time, Doc H was checking me for a palate infection and happened to notice the ugly throat sore, which did not hurt at that time.
It does hurt now. Hurts enough that I’ve pretty much slid back off solid food and onto full time chocolate milk. And that spot is generating its own brand of thick, icky mucous, interfering with both breathing and speaking.
Which is the real frustration. If this turns out to be malignant and I have to be treated again, I’m going to be really ticked off. I’ve just about worked my way back to being a functional professional. I can do public speaking and be understood. I can travel and not be daily exhausted. I can work days of reasonable length, and balance multiple projects. I can sell and do projects. With the great patience and assistance of my professional colleagues, I’ve finally gotten HEALTHY again.
If I have to go back into the bowels of the medical system and be irradiated and chemo-treated and get weak and screw up my speaking I am going to be really really pissed off at the universe. Which, as we’ve established over the almost two-year life span of this whiney cancer weblog, is completely pointless and a waste of rage that might be channeled productively elsewhere. We’ll see. This week I go to my GP’s office for the pre-op stuff required by the anesthesiologist’s or the surgeon’s insurance company (blood physics, chemistry and biology, EKG), the following week I’m back under the surgeon’s knives to have tissues for the bioassay carved out of my throat. Updates next week, all. With a little luck, the following week I’ll have more photos of my throat and some idea regarding Dr. H’s preliminary visual take on the bad spot.
But there is this. We’re all here to walk away from one more New Year. And THAT’S something to celebrate!!!!!!
When I was a kid, the world was young. My parents lived through World War Two—the attic at the cottage in Pompton Lakes was stuffed with, among other stuff, a fat file of newspapers and magazines from the war, including the big headlines on the New York City papers from VE and especially VJ days. People kept quiet about sex (when I was near puberty, my folks took a half dozen books out of the library and scattered them around the house for one six-week return cycle) and drugs (you can’t imagine the chain of events perpetrated by the afternoon I was alone in the house and got to watch the lady from next door sneak in through the back porch to get her day’s fix of alcoholic beverages from our collection on the kitchen counter). Self-expression was a little more…inhibited. You seldom heard people swear in public unless in pain or drunk. You NEVER saw people swear in writing except for the shocking (SHOCKING) use of raw language by Hemingway, Ginsberg, et al. No, the proper way to indicate swearing in print was the top row of the typewriter, caps: !@#$%^&*()_)(*&^%$#!@#$%^&. Nowadays, drugs are less universal (if measured by the standard of tobacco use), sex is physiology not taboo, and, hell, language in communications media, including what’s left of print media, is what it needs to be.
But there’s still applicability to be wrung from the old-fashioned #$%^&*&^%. Now, it’s for expressing frustration nominally beyond swearing. You use that top row of the keyboard when you’d have to chain so many nasty adjectives and/or adverbs together that you’d lose impact.
I tend to stick %^&*(*&^ in the subject line of work emails. I don’t worry so much about language in the body of emails (what are they gonna do, fire me?), even after years ago my boss had to take me aside to make me understand that my use of the “all company” address list to circulate my suggestion that everyone drop their pants and moon their neighbors on the night Frank Zappa died indicated something less than a fully mature professional ethic. And had ticked off a number of more sensitive, mostly administrative or clerical people (be an interesting study to ascertain why) nationwide.
Anyway. Early this week, I sent a “$%^&*(*&” email updating my medical condition to a few of my colleagues who are also close friends. Here’s the deal:
Last weekend, my mouth was fussy. Lots of goop (i.e. sticky mostly dried mucous) from the roof of my mouth. Some generalized pain as well, although more nagging than acute. I felt like it might be an infection in my mouth, possibly up in my palate somewhere. So on Monday I called my GP’s office and made an appointment for Wednesday morning.
Monday I got home, farted around, read just about to the finish of the Gospel of Mark (I’m now deep into Luke, timing things beautifully this year, I can’t wait to see the Pope and the creepy ceramic Christ figurine at midnight on Christmas Eve mass), and started the second volume of Laini Taylor’s OUTSTANDING Y.A.D. series that began with Daughter of Smoke and Bone and has now moved on to Days of Blood and Starlight. When time for bed, I did my usual toilette, rinsing my mouth preparatory to brushing my teeth (or “brosse les dents” as I believe Ms. Azvadorian, delightful language teacher from PLHS, would have put it).
Which elicited a shocking effusion of blood. Fresh, bright red blood, with clotty hunks mixed in. Once I’d broken the dam by mouth rinsing, the blood just poured out. I tried to estimate the volume while I worked to a) reduce the loss rate, and b) localize the source in my oral cavity. I estimated somewhere between 100 and 200 milliliters of blood before the flow stopped, more or less on its own. Nor could I see any obvious source.
But flushing a deciliter or two of blood in a sudden incident is a bit shocking. I couldn’t make my mouth repeat the bleeding, but on Tuesday I called my oncologist’s office to let him know I was going to see my GP. His administrator actually tracked him down and made him take the call, and he told me to come in so he could scope my throat.
Which worked out well. My GP can’t do throat scoping. He said “Huh. Maybe it’s a sinus infection. Let’s try some antibiotics” and gave me a scrip for a big-ass jar of amoxicillin plus clavulanate potassium. That was like 10 in the morning. So I drove to the office, worked for a few hours, then whipped back up and around the Baltimore Beltway to see Dr. H at GBMC in Towson.
He was upset about the bleeding incident, and frustrated that it didn’t repeat and so could not be diagnosed. But in the meantime, he insisted on scoping my throat thoroughly, which means running the cable through my sinuses via both nostrils in succession. When he finally snaked the wire out for the last time, he turned the computer around and said “OK, here’s what I’m lookin’ at. There’s a sort of a bleeding sore on your palate, but that doesn’t seem like it would have precipitated a deciliter of gore, so you should probably assume you got a sinus infection and take those antibiotics. But do you see this mass here in your throat? That’s new. And disturbing.”
Indeed. There is a bright and shiny new growth in my throat, which looks really, really ugly. Rather resembles a fungal skin infection we used to get as kids called impetigo, which manifested as swollen mountains of tissue with raw bloody spots and scabs on them. Icky.
So, mid-January, I gotta go back in to the hospital for anesthesia and diagnostic biopsy surgery. In the interim, of course, I need a full suite of blood assays and an EKG, required (I presume) as pre-op prep by either the anesthesiologist’s or the surgeon’s insurance company.
Thus the “#$%^&*()(*&^%” email. If this sucker is malignant and I have to be treated again, I’m gonna be pretty well pissed off. At nobody and nothing in particular, of course. And we’ve already established that the Universe Don’t Give A Rat’s Ass.
Maybe it’s benign. I’ll dedicate this round of diagnostics to the poor alcoholic woman who used to live next door to my parents at the cottage in Pompton Lakes. If nothing else, I’m sure she would appreciate the Xanax prescription!
It’s Christmas Eve Eve, my friends, and we’re all still here, despite Mayan prophecy and internet paranoia. I’m just glad to be here. Really, really glad to be here. Gonna make the family ravioli recipe, a boned (as in de-boned) and stuffed turkey, and shrimp and smoked fish for Christmas Eve supper. Going to finish the four gospels and Revelation, and watch the Pope totter through Christmas Eve services from Rome. Most of all, I’m going to bask in the fact of life itself. Under easily imaginable circumstances, in most of the alternate realities out there in the multiverse, I’m not here to feel the love. But in THIS universe, I am. I love you all. I’ll probably get a fresh essay up at http://www.aehsfoundation.org/ later in the week, and some recipes and photos up at http://docviper.livejournal.com/ after Christmas. Have a good holiday, everyone. This might be a good time to reflect, whether you’re a believer or not, on the prospect that the God of Christianity, Judaism, and Islam is the SAME FRICKIN’ GOD. Which, of course, means that the ongoing violence done in his/her/its name (I kind of like Alanis Morisette’s portrayal in Dogma) is OUR problem to solve.
Every year around this time, for just a few days, I feel like maybe we’re up to it. Wish I could capture that feeling year round. Love you all. Ma Salaama!
Led Zeppelin apparently did not borrow the lyrics for “Good Times, Bad Times” from earlier blues artists. I note this only because they did routinely did do so, sometimes (and sometimes not) crediting their elders. I bring it up here because if there’s one thing cancer (and its aftermath) teaches is that there are good times and bad times and you got to handle both.
Let’s start with this week’s “good”. I got to do some experimental voice therapy. I traveled the prior week, successfully giving a presentation to a large room of people and some on the telecon line. Score one for my diction. I gave public credit to my daily recitation of learning tapes of conversational Arabic as my Demosthenes’ pebbles. Of course Demosthenes did a whole lot more for his rhetorical skills than learn to speak through a faceful of rocks. He practiced speaking while sprinting up hills, he talked through and over horrific storms, he cut his hair in silly ways so he’d be too embarrassed to go to town and then spent the months it took his hair to grow back speaking constantly in the wilderness (a nicely descriptive, if unacademic, depiction of Demosthenes’ hard work on his public speaking skills is http://www.mainlesson.com/display.php?author=tappan&book=oldworld&story=demosthenes ).
Anyway, this week I had to road test several drafts of the Holidays driving CD. So, for the first half of the week, I skipped my Arabic. My vocal skills declined perceptibly. Later in the week, I went back to an hour a day (half hour each way) of loud, careful pronunciation of difficult Arabic phrases. Voice got a lot better. Clearly, working on conversational Arabic is therapeutic for the cancer-and-radiation impaired vocal apparatus. Got to let my speech therapist know about this.
Now to the week’s bad. My vocal skills actually peaked out late on Friday. By Saturday morning, I noticed a thick sort of mucous running along the top of my mouth—an unusual location. Generally, now there’s no moisture up there at all. Then Saturday night I was expectorating big blobs of…well, we probably don’t want to go there. Suffice it to say that I’m pretty sure I have some kind of infection in my palate. Soft or hard, I’m not sure, but between the pain, the goop, and the dysfunctional diction, I’m pretty certain there’s microbial mischief going on.
Perhaps a little unexpected at this point. After all, the post-radiation physiology, with the depressed white blood cell production, is something of a best-of-all-bacterial worlds. As I know from my jaw bone infection (still have the chunk of jaw that broke off in a vial on my shelf). But this long after, it’s probably more a matter of oral hygiene. I find it difficult to clear the roof of my mouth in the evening, it takes a few minutes of intense work. I’m guessing I need to do that more than once a day to be really safe. But the process itself is somewhat noisy and fairly disgusting. Not the kind of thing I can do in our compact offices with the lightly constructed walls.
Ahh, well. I’ll go see my GP this week and see what he thinks. I have a couple sets of antibiotic prescriptions stashed away from last year as well. One way or another, I’ll get through it. Goopy as it may be.
Been changed by cancer? Oh yeah, I have indeed. I’m more quietly satisfied, vs. verbally euphoric, at the good times. And I’m much, much more calm and stoic in the face of the bad ones.
And that awesome drum riff from “Good Times, Bad Times”? Apparently Bonham learned to play both the 16th note bass triplets and the steady high hat with a single kick drum. Because he didn’t realize that Carmine Appice, who’s beat it was, actually played it with a double bass.
Rock on, everyone. I’ll give you the medical update next week. Sustainability news and views at http://www.aehsfoundation.org/ and http://sustainablebiospheredotnet.blogspot.com/ . I haven’t had a chance to update more Young Adult Dystrophy reviews at http://theresaturtleinmysoup.blogspot.com/ . Or the natural history and photos at http://docviper.livejournal.com/ . Maybe over the next few holiday weeks I’ll get the weblog empire updating out of phase, and I’ll just announce site-by-site when and where there’s new material up. Hopefully the antibiotics will help with that. Have a great week, everybody!
And it could always get worse. But what doesn’t really help (me, at least), is knowing that “other people have the same problem”. It’s a cliché of cancer therapy that the victim should “join a group”. Not being much of a joiner, I always ask why. The answer “so you’ll know there are others facing these issues” isn’t satisfying. I mean, I wish I didn’t have to face these problems. I REALLY wish other people didn’t have to face them.
On the other hand, in an admitted twist of functional logic, it does make me feel at least a little lucky to know that things could be a hell of a lot worse. Take my checkout kid at the market today. She and the customer ahead of me had an animated discussion about the kid’s paralyzed right leg. When I asked what was up she said “Oh, that was my pediatrician, I haven’t seen her in a while. I had polio and it paralyzed my right leg, so now I’m in special classes to learn to drive with my left leg only. Do you have your discount card with you?” I looked at her and thought: a) polio? In the 2000s? What the hell??”, and b) “man, I may still be working my way out from under cancer but at least my leg’s not paralyzed.”
But that’s not why we’re here. We’re here to talk about flying. In airplanes. There just HAS to be some better technology within reach. For crap’s sake, air travel still means stuffing people into a tube made of riveted quarter-inch alloy, accelerating the whole show to 400 miles per hour, and, as Led Zeppelin put it, “taking your chances on a big jet plane”.
And what does this rant have to do with cancer? Just this. Whenever I fly now, my mouth and throat tissues swell up into big painful poofy blobs, kind of like a miniature or toy version of “The Thing” on steroids. It’s incredibly uncomfortable, makes even the attempt to eat solid food look hopeless, and smears my speech past the precision that the hour-per-day of conversational Arabic allows under normal, i.e. non-flight circumstances.
One theory is that the low-humidity environment of the aircraft causes my mucosal expansion. Personally, I’m inclined to think it has more to do with the low pressure conditions at altitude and the inherent instability of radiation-damaged tissues. Either way, it’s something of a pain in the ass, since functioning as a professional scientist in today’s world rather depends on air transit.
Depending on destination, salvation is sometimes available in the form of hormone-free, organic, pasture-fed (is there any alternative to the latter?) chocolate milk sold by the half gallon in Whole Foods markets across North America.
Such was the case on the most pleasant trip to the East Bay region of California last week. While I didn’t quite get the atmospherics aligned—I took the Thanksgiving Driving CD instead of Dead Kennedy’s classics with East Bay Ray on keyboards—I had a great time, a successful colloquium, and got to see that Beth and Maggie are settled comfortably in a gorgeous home within walking distance of downtown Walnut Creek. Damn, life hardly gets better than that, huh?
I’ll have to fly back out to see them as soon as possible. Stopping for a couple jugs of Whole Foods chocolate milk on the way in from the airport, of course.
My writing life seems to be pretty much back under control. Meaning there’s sustainability commentary on my professional blog at http://www.aehsfoundation.org/, same at http://sustainablebiospheredotnet.blogspot.com/, a little natural history over at http://docviper.livejournal.com/ , and some holiday celebratory kickoff book review material up at http://theresaturtleinmysoup.blogspot.com/ . That’s right, my friends. The entire weblog enterprise is back up and functioning like a well-oiled…well, occasionally lubricated…ok, barely scraping by on rusty moving parts…machine. But at least it’s back up and functioning. Love to everyone, especially those I saw this week for the first time in a couple of years who thought I was either dead or permanently incapacitated. You can’t imagine how fantastic it was to get to talk to you, slurry as my speech might have been. Rock and roll, everybody. Remember to party hearty—world’s gonna end on 21 December, so we got a LOT of livin’ to do by then!
Young Dr. N asked if I wanted him to “spray” me, but which he meant spritz my nasal passages with nominal anesthetic. I told him to skip it. As Dr. H told me long ago, “I offer the anesthetic because it makes me feel better, but it really doesn’t help”. One thing about cancer—it forces you to face the truth in many things, small and large.
This was the Monday after Thanksgiving. I reported no systemic or insistent pain, although I did tell him that my throat hurt like hell after a weekend of partying and felt like someone had rubbed it down with coarse-grit sandpaper.
Dr. N slipped the video cable through my sinuses and into my throat. He said “Ooh, it’s a mess in there. Lotta blood. Swelling. Icky.” I’m sure he meant the latter in the most technical possible way. He seemed concerned, and I remembered the docs all being worried last time I showed up with bloody swelling in my throat. But when I inquired, he said it wasn’t anything to be concerned about. It’s just the aftermath of radiation.
In other words, I’m still enduring the anatomical devastation wrought by radiation administered almost two years ago. What the frickin’ hell?! Well, I gather now that the alteration of my throat mucosal membranes from tough enough to eat the weirdest comestibles on offer in Asia and the Middle East to wimpy, cottony, painful marshmallowy tissue may be more permanent than not.
Yum. At the moment, if I manage to eat a few hundred calories of solid food twice a day, I’m doing good. Mostly I eat a microwaved sausage or chicken biscuit for lunch, and sometimes a bit of pasta or potatoes for dinner. I need to slurp liquid with every bite to get the food bolus into condition to make it down my throat. Which is odd, because my epiglottis is nonfunctional. Far as I can tell, stuff ought to slide on in and about half the time make it properly down my gastrointestinal tract via my esophagus and half the time screw up and choke me by clogging up my breathing passages. Somehow, by some physiological magicianship, my throat doesn’t let this happen. Mostly food gets into my GIT and air gets into my trachea. I get a screw-up now and then, and if I tilt my head wrong when I ingest liquid I can pretty much drown, and some foods (rice, in almost any form, for example) have a greater tendency to gunk up my breathing apparatus. But mostly, for an anatomical wasteland, the complexities of my throat seem to operate pretty well.
Not necessarily so for my tongue and voicebox. My speech is still sloppy. Talking too much tires my vocal apparatus and makes my mouth ache and my voice slurred. When I speak slowly and precisely, I can make myself understood, but I sound brain damaged, at least to me. I’m from New Jersey. I’m used to talking full speed and assuming the listener will catch up or fall behind and either way it’s not my problem.
Except it is now. I have to get my speech back to a professionally competent level. But you know what? It’s actually improving, and rather more rapidly now. I started investing more seriously in trying to learn spoken Arabic (I need to learn to read and write as well, but for the moment speaking is the relevant skill). I started with some Egyptian Arabic CDs, switched to Eastern Arabic (which is quite different, in fact) and my speaking has been getting clearer and clearer. Arabic is rich in glottal stops, rolled Rs, and wide breathy phonemes, all of which are difficult for my post-radiation vocal apparatus to deal with. Half an hour each way with the progressive CDs on my daily commute, and not only am I getting some rudimentary Arabic, my English is getting much, much clearer.
So I gotta stop complaining so much and just keep working. Ma Salaama, my friends. Check professional blog over at http://www.aehsfoundation.org/ . Also, I’m supposed to do some traveling this week, I’ll try to get some photos and travelogue up at docviper next week. Enjoy the start to the holidays, all. I’m almost through Matthew already, ready to start Mark. I should be at Revelation ahead of schedule, ready to watch the Pope mumble through mass on Christmas Eve. Love to all!
