It Might Get Messy

This is a hard entry to write. Please bear with me. I might drift off the track some or get lost in irrelevancies. But I’ll work to keep it on point and target-centered. If I wander, just walk with me a few steps. We’ll get back to the path together. I promise.

Messy comes in many varieties. There’s purposeful, directional, forward-looking messy. This is the kind of mess you find in the laboratories of scientists headed for breakthroughs, novelists finishing masterpieces, painters getting those last strokes onto a long worked and re-worked canvas. It’s the kind of messiness that, in the end, is irrelevant. Tracking backward from the finished product, you can trace the threads of its maturation, growth and birth through the piles of shit left along the way—the heaps of empty paint cans, stacks of books and papers, empty coffee containers, and pizza boxes. The mess, in this case, is a means to an end. And so, in a twisted way, possessed of an odd kind of inherent interest, kind of the way projectiles dug from the soil of civil war battlefields, the latter as close to a “perfect” mess as it may be possible to contemplate, are artifacts linking the messy process it took to get there to the outcome that made a world a damn site less messy than before.

Then there’s messy that’s just a mess. Because we live in a universe defined by dimensions of space and time, “mess” is not stasis. It fluctuates, sometimes bigger, sometimes smaller, always pushing forward, like a mole rat hell bent on moving 10 or 15 meters of African desert soil from its tubular highway to a heap on a roadside. But it doesn’t necessarily have a purpose, a direction, an objective. It’s just the mess that goes with life and living.

Or with death and dying. The universe as a whole doesn’t care who or what is alive and losing entropy or dead and re-upping the entropy supply. It may ultimately be that the universe likes having entropy compiled and then dissipated, a process that produces order from the cold fragments of black eternity. But I’m not prepared to go there yet. I’m only prepared to say that I don’t think the universe gives a rat’s ass whether it’s my butt using energy to keep entropy at bay, or something else—like maybe an actual rat’s ass.

Friday I went in for a PET scan. That’s the one where they inject me full of radiolabeled glucose, wait a while until the tissue starts to accumulate same in proportion to metabolic activity, and then image the residual radioactivity, yielding a graphic showing metabolic hotspots, which in a healthy human include such high-energy machinery as the brain, liver, kidneys, and heart. In an unhealthy human, malignant tumors rock and roll on that fludeoxyglucose, slurping it like an Ann Rice character lost in Texas Chain Saw movie.

The accessibility of the software seems to vary from visit-to-visit. This time, I’ve not been able to get the clearest or easiest-to-see images for you. Which actually makes the point rather vehemently. What I CAN see in these images is frightening. And you’re talking about a guy who thought he had seen “frightening” become passé in the years of radiation exposure, chemical treatment, and surgery.

The PET scan image above shows my brain in bright red and orange shows that the brain tissue is doing what it does—work. Hard. All the time. The human brain is massively energetically expensive. The bright color in the images demonstrates that the radiolabeled sugar is being absorbed rapidly and massively and used in place to make sure that my mind is…uh…minding the store, so to speak.

Now, one of the other figures is the scary one.

The image above shows a disembodied orange spot in the middle of my neck. That has no business being there. The normal tissue there plugs away at a none-too-swift metabolic rate, maintaining the mucosal surface, operating the swallowing and speaking muscles, generally just making sure things run smoothly. The fact that there is a bright shiny hotspot of radiolabeled glucose uptake there in that region of mostly slow chugging tissue is a really bad thing. 

My friends, I haven’t begun to come to grips with the meaning of all this. I do know that treatment options are a lot more limited this time. My body’s taken pretty much all the radiation dosimetry it can take for quite a while, so generic radiation treatment is out of the tool kit. Leaves us with chemotherapy and surgery. Neither one sounds particularly attractive to me at his point. I’ve been getting better and better, my voice becoming more understandable, my energy level increasing, my grip on life becoming tight again. I taught the first class of the semester on Thursday night, and the kids could understand me just fine. 

Let’s hope that whatever has to be done to fix this new physiological contretemps means the students can understand my voice all the way through the semester. That’s gonna be my benchmark for this one. If I can teach the full class without drastic remedial activities of any kind, I’ll take it as a good sign.

Next week, I expect Dr. H to look over these PET and CAT scans and schedule an MRI in prep for surgery. I’ll keep you plugged in. I’m a little concerned about this recurrence, I have to admit. I’ll need all of you out there pulling for me this time. Thanks for being here for me!!!