It Might Get Messy

War between Greece and Persia began in the mid-500s BC when Cyrus I of Persia captured Greek cities in Ionia, on what his now the Turkish coast. Over the next 50 years, Ionia revolted several times, with support from Athens. By 494 BC, revolts were suppressed by Darius I operating both at sea and on land. Despite the successful outcome, Darius was thoroughly pissed off at Greece, especially Athens, for supporting Ionia. 

In 490 BC, Darius expressed his dissatisfaction with the Greeks by invading the mainland, specifically heading for Athens. At the Battle of Marathon, an alliance of Greek city states defeated the Persian expeditionary forces, as announced by Pheidippides right before he dropped dead from exhaustion after running the 26 miles from Marathon to Athens.

Darius passed his affection for the Greeks along to his son Xerxes. Xerxes tried again to invade Greece, this time with a massive army of hundreds of thousands of troops and a large navy. Delayed at Thermopylae by another Greek alliance, Xerxes broke through after three days of intense battles with Spartans under Leonidas. The time lag was sufficient for the Greek navy to hammer the Persian fleet. Xerxes made it to Athens, but was thoroughly defeated at Plataea. Having tried three times to conquer Greek city states, the Persians gave it up and never again threatened Greece in any meaningful way. 

And why am I subjecting you to this ridiculous historical abstract? Because there are layers and layers of lessons here for those battling cancer. Basically, cancer victims are a defensive crowd, putting us in the place of the Greeks over centuries of war with Persia. First thing to learn is that just showing up is important. After all, if 300 Spartans and a backing force of several hundred Phocians, Locrians, and Lesbians (the latter from the island city state of Lesbos, no reference to sexual orientation) hadn’t shown up, the combined Persian army and navy would have had free access to the Greek Peninsula and a straight shot at Athens. 

Second lesson is: once you show up, fight like hell. Military operations have options for retreat and regrouping, cancer victims have no such viable alternatives. Best analogy here is with the Spartan expeditionary force. They knew fighting to the death was what was needed, and they did what had to be done. Cancer treatment is complicated, scary, and painful. Like having your own little Thermopylae Road in your physiology. You’re going to die anyway, you might as well die fighting. 

There are other lessons we could glean from the history of the Greco-Persian wars, but this column is a cancer diary update, not a historical ramble. Well, not a ramble beyond those paragraphs above, anyway. Here’s this week’s report from CancerLand.

Monday they bolted me down under the radiation generators and attempted to align my malignancy with the radiobeams. Took almost an hour of frustration by the technicians and nurses. Finally we worked it out so that when I’m strapped in for real, it’s my responsibility to “relax your shoulders down, tilt your head back into the table, push the left side of your head hard against the mesh, and raise your chin to cram up against the mesh”. Oy. Being bolted down in a cage like Winston Smith waiting for the rats to be released is stressful enough without having to remember to squash my face into the mesh at the proper moment.

Radiation treatments started Tuesday, and then went to two-a-days (0830 hrs and 1500 hrs). Between treatments, the hospital is kind enough to let me use a corner of the waiting area as my office (photo below).

Anyway, on Thursday, the chemotherapy staff discovered that they couldn’t access the medical port that was inserted into my chest a couple years ago. So they sent me to another department—“Interventional Radiology”. Sounds like something out of 1984, maybe the sign on a single door in a long, dark hallway as they drag Winston Smith in for his “treatments”. IR tried mightily to access the port. After 30 or 40 minutes of hammering, they discovered via injection that the port is physically broken—stuff injected simply leaks out into my chest cavity rather than feeding into my circulatory system. 

This means my chemo infusions will be done via freehand IV. The drugs they’re proposing are nasty, but you’ll have to wait until next week for a drug briefing (I sound like some marginally competent field agent for the DEA working a remote border road say between North Dakota and the middle of nowhere Canada). Because this week, the radiation already has already taken discernible hold on my physiology. The right hand side of my face is showing signs of radiation burns. And I’ve been barfing a couple times a day, despite eating low volumes of benign liquid medical “food” via my GIT tube. They gave me a scrip for enormous amounts of liquid Ondantsetron and a scopolamine skin patch to try to quell the vomiting. Once they start the chemotherapy (next Tuesday), part of the infusion brew is even more massively powerful anti-vomiting drugs. Hopefully despite the beating the rest of my body is taking, chronic vomiting won’t be part of the repertoire going forward. 

Anyway. With the fussy positioning I have to do to keep my tumor in the radiobeams, I wonder what tissues are ACTUALLY being cooked. Oh yeah, one more thing. Despite my missing tongue, I can smell and taste the tumors as they deep-fat-fry. It’s a cooked-meat flavor, with a dash of really gruesome Limburger cheese and a whiff of rotten fruit. Yum. Hopefully I’m smelling “tumor” and not just some fleshy part of my mouth cavity!

New stuff around the weblog horn this week. Starting Sunday night, check out http://docviper.livejournal.com/ (which, in addition to pre-publishing the next chapter in the urban ecosystems book, has cool photos of fish in the hospital aquarium and some plants from the hospital grounds), http://theresaturtleinmysoup.blogspot.com/ , http://sustainablebiospheredotnet.blogspot.com/ , professional blog at http://www.aehsfoundation.org/ (go to lower left on the home page and click through to the blog) and DAC Crossley’s wild west blog at http://daccrossley.typepad.com/ . 

Thanks for being here, everybody. Once again, it’s important for me to tell you that knowing you all are out there in the world rooting for me makes me much stronger and better at fighting the cancer and its painful and difficult treatment. Love to everyone, let anybody who inquires know how I’m doing and send ‘em to this blog. Talk to you next week!