Across no-man’s land, the rebellious fortresses of Darwin and his guerilla army. Only random, inherent variations in the anatomy or physiology of organisms (they didn’t know about genetics or DNA at the time) are passed along to offspring. No man’s land is a bright line—the dumbshit Lamarckian losers facing the brilliant rising tide of Darwinian genius.
I believed in this simple, either/or, right-or-wrong universe when I was a kid. Then, over the summer before my junior year at Rutgers, I read The Origin of Species. And was immediately stricken with panic. Darwin was NOT the white-hat yang to Lamarck’s black hat yin. Darwin believed in the inheritance of individual experience. Darwin was a Lamarckian!
Over my long academic career, I took many classes in evolution. None of them spent any time on Darwin’s belief in inherited experience. Kind of made me wonder if the profs hadn’t slogged through The Origin. Or that maybe they just didn’t want to deal with the complications. Far be it for me (now THAT’S a strange idiom. Try translating that into, say, Serbian, or maybe Cantonese) to be cynical. But it sure seemed that something so obvious in the Origin warranted a slot in the curriculum.
Anyway. It’s not difficult to find Lamarck in the Origin. In the first edition (the Origin of Species changed enormously over its life of some 20 editions), Chapter 5 is titled “Laws of Variation”. Under subhead “Effects of Use and Disuse” Darwin says:
…I think there can be little doubt that use in our domestic animals strengthens and enlarges certain parts, and disuse diminishes them; and that such modifications are inherited.
Bang. There you have it, sports fans. Darwin believed that those stretchy-necked giraffe things passed their stretchy necks on to their offspring.
I don’t really know what, if anything, this means in the big picture. And I’m pretty sure that many of you out there are wondering what, if anything, this has to do with cancer and its aftermath.
Well, what it has to do with is my newest health contretemps. It’s an artifact of Darwinian disuse.
See, my thoracic and cephalic anatomy was broken down and then rebuilt as a necessary aspect of treatment. The bottom line is that my mouth is no longer a functional component of my anatomy. It’s been decoupled from both the gastrointestinal and respiratory systems. I can no longer use my mouth for speaking, eating, or breathing. It’s just sort of there, with its plumbing capped off.
It turns out, if you don’t use your mouth for anything, it starts to close up as the muscles formerly so useful for eating, drinking, breathing, and speaking find themselves no longer exercised. So, for most of the past year, my mouth gape has been shrinking. I’ve been kind of casually fighting this by using the special mouth exercise machine the speech pathologists gave me back when we thought I might be able to actually use my mouth when the treatments were finished. But it’s a struggle. My jaw muscles are partially frozen in place, and day-by-day they shrink a little more.
Which wouldn’t, on its face, seem to matter. I don’t need my mouth for anything, why not let it retire in peace?
Ah. Because oral hygiene is still important! You’ll recall that a few years ago, medical science established that microbial inflammation originating in the mouth plays hell with heart and lung health. A clean, well-managed oral cavity is crucial for long-term quality of physiological life.
But, if your mouth is shrinking shut, it gets harder and harder to reach in there to keep it clean. In fact, it gets rather painful. So, a few weeks ago, I found myself letting my oral hygiene slip. And was swiftly and violently punished for the lapse. I started to cough up lots of fresh blood. I was running weird cycles of fever and chills, sweating profusely for no reason. And generally feeling crummy.
This week I finally made the connection between my deteriorating health and my deteriorating oral infrastructure. So I did what needed to be done. Started forcing, however painfully, my mouth open enough to swab it down several times a day with clean water and baking soda.
The effort paid off. I’m back to feeling good again. My mouth is nice and clean. But I can see that this is going to be a long-term difficulty. It seems inevitable that my gape is going to shrink, despite my best efforts. And it’s going to get progressively more difficult to maintain effective standards of oral hygiene.
Just one more thing to whine about here in Cancer Land (copyright, trademark). But with a little discipline, I expect I can keep this aspect of my health under control.
Let’s hope so. Because with spring here, summer is not far behind. And that means that the beach is coming into focus. So I gotta maintain my health so I can get to the barrier islands in shape to cook, catch cottonmouths, and park my butt on the beach. Which also brings us to this week’s musical interlude.
This Week’s Musical Interlude
As promised last week, I’m gonna append a brief bit of recommended listening to this regular web log. Life demands good music, dammit! Anyway, in keeping with the beach theme, Amazon offers a 4 disk download of awesome guitar instrumentals called Surf Age Nuggets. You can find it at
http://www.amazon.com/Surf-Age-Nuggets-Various-artists/dp/B00FKDYHU6/ref=sr_1_1_title_1_mus?s=music&ie=UTF8&qid=1398577700&sr=1-1&keywords=surf+age+nuggets
I highly recommend it. For $38 you get a massive set of awesome guitar tones and tunes. By the time you’re into the second disk, you’ll be lost to the conscious world, deep in daydreams of hot sun, crashing surf, and Negroni cocktails on the deck. No household should be without!
Oh. One more thing. Spring is here. Means I’m getting out and getting used to my new high velocity, industrial grade, NASA approved camera. A couple of photos are appended below to whet your appetite. And then, if you have a few moments to kill, surf on over to docviper.livejournal.com where I’ve posted a longer string of flowers and other early spring photos.
Enjoy! Thanks for being here. Rock on, everybody. Just because we damn well can!!!
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