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!
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