It Might Get Mess
Viniculture is in an uproar. I know how shocked you are to hear that. But not to worry. The issues are well beyond the palate of any of us (especially me, being as I have cancer of the palate. But let’s ignore that for the moment). The issues are complicated. At one level, there is a basic dichotomy between the wine that’s easy to produce and wine that somebody is willing to pay for. Beyond that, there is a question as to what precisely a “great” wine is. And the answer to that question depends on whether the grower believes in a slippery European concept of “Terroir”. Fundamentally, some people think good wine is good wine, and anywhere you can produce a rich, flavorful, delicious wine by whatever means necessary, it should be done. Other people think wine reflects the soil type, slope, weather, microclimate, and other local conditions, and may be thin and less flavorful while demonstrating the site-specific “terroir”.
You can probably guess where I come down in this debate. Hell, if I can get a cabernet sauvignon that has that cut-cedar aroma and a thick, syrupy, mouth-filling texture, I don’t care if it’s grown in Inner Mongolia, I’m gonna love it. But I do understand that odd locally favored grapes and quirky wines have value as well. For years before I had to give up drinking (due to malignancies no doubt at least partially caused by said drinking), I was hooked on a rare grape called Viognier. This grape made southern French white wines, and was nearly extinct—down to its last few hectares—when the international fine wine community (or “wineaux”, as I like to think of them) discovered it and approved. Now it’s grown in South America, California, and Italy, along with a big comeback in France.
Anyway. Here’s the point. It takes really active, ongoing, hard-working, blood-sweat-and-tears wine-making to grow fat, rich, international-style wine from any piece of ground anywhere in the world. You need lots of oak barrels (possibly oak chips for smaller wineries), concentrated, low-yield vines constantly pruned, and often blending wine from accepted “international” grapes to add to your brew. The “terroir” approach, at its worst, simply means the grower lets the grapes grow as they will and takes the wine as it comes. It’s a passive process that relies on the quality of the land to equate to the quality of the wine without additional intervention on the part of the grower.
Of course, reality is not as simple as that. Many “terroir” people put as much sweat and physical and monetary investment in their wines as the “international style” folks. Still, you can usually tell when the winemaker’s taken an active, ongoing role in production vs. someone who simply lets the wine wander where it will and bottles it up.
Cancer treatment is a lot like wine growing, if you’ll permit me to stretch the analogy. Ongoing responses to cancer fall into one of two categories. First category is “active”. The many and frantic and complicated things you do and have to do in attempting to wrestle the illness to a standstill at least. Second category is “passive”. Of necessity, there is considerable down time in cancer treatment, while the physicians and patient wait to see the results of treatments—those hyperactive, hypercomplicated, often painful and uncomfortable efforts to stem the disease.
At the moment, I’m in one of those “rest periods”. Radiation and chemotherapy are over. Now we have to wait for the throat and palate tissues to recover from the walloping those treatments gave them. And that recovery takes many weeks. At some point, the damage from the radiation will be healed. Then we can do the diagnostic tests that will reveal whether or not, or to what degree, the treatments succeeded in arresting the malignancy.
I’ve been attempting to foresee the outcome by quiet meditation, letting myself feel what in my throat seems natural and what might be ongoing malignancy. I’m handicapped in this effort, though, because the surgical reconstruction of my oral cavity, coupled with the treatment impacts proper, have left my throat in a frightful mess. Even now when I’m not in chronic severe pain, I’m uncomfortable. There are lumps and cuts and misshapen components in there, and I have no idea whether they “should” be there, or if they represent residual or resurgent malignancy.
Given that my doctors gave me a 20% probability of successful treatment, I’m afraid the discomfort may represent the hard reality of persistent cancer. But I don’t know for sure. I must admit that I am considerably stronger than I have been, and that I feel better than I expected to at this point. I think this week I see Dr. H, my surgeon. He has at least helped stem the chronic infection that made my throat sore and my mucosal secretions stink. Part of that success is the regular change-out of the internal components of the tracheostomy. I’d had the same PVC plumbing in there since February until Dr. H’s student changed it out a couple weeks ago. Now we’re going with a replacement every two weeks and we’ll see what happens.
I doubt that it’s time yet for regrown tumor material to be visible or for a PET scan to see through the tissue destruction of the residual radiation and chemotherapy effects. But if it IS, and Dr. H gives it a look-see, I will keep you posted. For the moment, just know that I’m feeling better than I have in a long time. Still incredibly weak, but not in constant pain, starting to expand my exercise beyond a couple hundred meters of walk to pushing a thousand.
And of course, there’s always Dr. T’s promise that if they can’t cure my malignancies, they’ll make me comfortable. Or, as she put it, “VERY comfortable” if and as I succumb to the cancers.
But we’re not at that point yet. My humble thanks to all of you for your support. I can feel the love, truly in ways I never expected to. Check in around the weblog horn on Sunday night. There will be stuff up at http://docviper.livejournal.com/
, http://theresaturteinmysoup.blogspot.com/, http://sustainablebiospheredotnet.blogspot.com/ , and professional blog at www.aehsfoundation.org (find the click-through on lower left of the main page). And don’t forget Dr. Crossley’s wild west blog at daccrossley.typepad.com/ . Thanks for being here, everybody. A few summer photos follow for your delectation.
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