It Might Get Messy

A long time ago, in a galaxy far, far away…no, wait. It’s THIS galaxy, in fact, this planet. But it WAS a long time ago… .

Anyway. Set the Wayback Machine for early in the formation of the solar system.  Earth has existed as a sun-orbiting entity for a couple billion years. In that time, the ridiculously intricate chemistry of the young planet has given birth to living things. The atmosphere cloaking the dark, salt-less seas and lava-hot landforms is rich in hydrogen and helium, with a growing proportion of carbon dioxide thanks largely to those life forms. For a billion years or so, this is the earth: a retort of complex chemicals and metabolizing microbes in soupy water, battered by lightning, volcanoes, asteroids, and intense solar radiation that has yet to be tamed by a functional magnetosphere.

At some point, a few of those little packets of life experiment with a new approach to metabolic chemistry. They discover that all that carbon dioxide is an excellent source of energy and, as a bonus, an easy foundation for constructing the carbon-based infrastructure that supports all that cranked-up metabolism.

But this bit of evolutionary experimentation has very dark implications. A waste product of this new-fangled biochemistry is oxygen. And oxygen is acutely toxic. In fact, as CO2-based organisms proliferate (this metabolic pathway is very efficient, and makes its proud owners overwhelmingly successful competitors in the day-to-day life-and-death warfare that is the ecosystem), a threshold is crossed. The resulting “Oxygen Catastrophe” [1] is an enormously profligate extinction event. In fact, as atmospheric oxygen levels increase, nearly all of the living things that have been happily proliferating and diversifying for the past billion years die. The shattered remnants of biology on earth are the pitifully few scattered entities that can prosper, rather than fail, in an oxygen-rich environment.

And the rest is history. Well, technically, I suppose it’s pre-history.

Anyway. This bit of biochemical review gets us where we need to be for today’s entry. The point is simple: individual organisms function in an environmental context, much of which is beyond their control. This very obvious point, in fact, could serve as an accurate one-sentence summary of the science of ecology. But we don’t need to get grandiose, here. By simple analogy, those of us victimized by cancer and damaged by medical intervention function in an environment. The status of our “health”, “condition”, and “recovery” are all, then, relative to the larger social world in which we live.

For example. My recovery has made progress. If I take my meds, stay hydrated, and sit still in the recliner with a blanket draped over my legs and a heating pad stuffed up into my sweatshirt, I can almost forget I’m sick. I have to keep a big handful of paper towels in my lap to mop up the secretions that leak from my nose, mouth, and especially, tracheostomy tubing, but that’s no hardship when I’m reading, writing, and listening to music. 

However. If I start to move around, the volume of secretions increases immediately and enormously. Again, if I’m moving around the house, say, to prepare dinner, this isn’t a big issue. I keep myself mopped up, sit down frequently to stabilize things, and wash my hands obsessively. I can function, despite the increased volume of saliva, mucous, and occasional blood fluids pouring from my person.

Conversely, if I go to the supermarket, say to pick up a prescription, the Niagara Falls mucous flow becomes a real problem. Earlier this week I was at the pharmacy counter. Pharmacist asked a question. I leaned over to scribble my answer on the back of my shopping list. The act of leaning forward precipitates a big-ass flush of liquids from my person to my environment. Which in this case includes the pharmacy counter. So I have to busily and self-consciously mop up the goo, while the people behind me try (without much success) to contain their disgust, and while the pharmacist runs to get disinfectant and a box of sterile wipes. 

Yeah. It’s icky. And, unfortunately, the flux of bodily fluids is highly correlated with my activity level. If I hike into the Patuxent Reserve with my hot new camera, this isn’t a problem. I just stop in the woods to slobber. But if I’m trying to do something more social, say, visiting a museum, going to a movie, shopping at a mall or art supply store, I have to deal with a difficult and disconcerting volume of goop. This means I need to carry a roll of paper towels with me, and also that I have to haul along some safe and sanitary way to dispose of the resulting sticky and septic paper. Which is logistically complicated, and again, as I can see despite coughing fits and mop-up breaks, disgusting to my fellow shoppers, movie goers, or museum visitors.

So here’s my major dilemma at this point on the long and rocky road running across the mire that is the post-cancer landscape. When I sit quietly, med-up, and read, write, practice guitar, watch TV, or work on cut-paper art, I feel rather normal. I don’t feel sick. I don’t feel impaired or constrained. And this feeling, which is, I acknowledge a good thing, leads to severe frustration. Because, being well and feeling normal makes me want to do normal-person things. Go out. Go shopping. Attend sporting or artistic or musical events. Interact with people. And, as we’ve seen, any such activity immediately precipitates embarrassing symptoms which are not only disgusting, but threats to public health as well.

Sigh, he says, as a lone alto saxophone plays soto voce off in the distance. I’m only “recovered” and healthy relative to certain very specific environments. Like my recliner. Relative to other, less constrained environments, I remain sick, physiologically and socially impaired. 

Thank you all for being here. I am deeply in your debt. I was only able to prevail in my very real life and death struggle because I knew if I let the powerful tentacles of death that coiled around me win, I would lose all of you. And I was not willing to let that happen. As you think about your life, perhaps musing on the balance of “good” and “not so good” things you’ve done, consider this. You saved my life. And this is not an allegory or metaphor. You actually saved my life. And I love you for it. 

Oh. One more thing. I’ve stumbled across some fabulous music recently. Delain is a Dutch art metal outfit that is wildly original, positioned high on my World Beat Death Metal Fave Rave List. They are all over Amazon US, easy to track down. Salem is an Israeli thrash ensemble that weaves regional folk and popular music into their otherwise chops-rich heavy sound. It devolves that Israel, for some reason, is a real hotbed of high quality metal. You can download a free sampler album that is truly awe-inspiring here: 

http://www.metalindiamagazine.com/news/from-israhell-with-love-compilation-released-as-free-download

Rock the hell on, everyone. Just because you can. At my age, I need to take advantage of every opportunity to put the hammer down. Because the status of such opportunities is, as I have learned over the past nearly four years of dealing with vicious physiological impairments, fragile. Grab it while you got it. And I repeat: Rock the Hell On!

Notes

[1] An interesting, if not overly informative, discussion of this deep history is available at http://earthasweknewit.org/pages/oxygen-atmosphere