At some point here, I might have to devote some of my copious free time to developing one of those models that you hear about in the news periodically where academics and/or consultants cherry-pick a bizarre suite of input data, crank it through a proprietary (i.e., “you wanna know how this works? Ante up the cash, my friend. Oh, and while you’re counting those bills, sign this confidentiality/noncompete agreement that means you can’t reveal to your clients, some of whom might be key decision makers deciding matters of global public health, war and peace, safety, investment, famine, likely appearance of dense clouds of locusts and other quasi-Biblical plagues, etc., how and why you’re advising them as you are”) black box, and harvest the resulting spit forecasting future political instability, sustainability, or monetary behavior (for one of a zillion examples, see [1]).
Among the many problems inherent in such models is the complete lack of any appropriate control or reference tools by which the actual utility of the proprietary black box can be judged. In other words, let’s say you’re CEO of a major global energy conglomerate—Royal Dutch Shell, say, or maybe Exxon Mobil. You’re contemplating major investments in East Durka-Durkastan, a notoriously difficult region where tourist’s kidneys are regularly harvested by local warlords to finance opium-poppy industrial farms that finance in turn the Royal Durka-Durka Family’s lifestyle, domestic police force, private jet fleet, and bail-out properties in Kensington, South Beach, and the Upper West Side. Back in the cube farm at your headquarters in Amsterdam or Houston you’ve got an alcoholic, unsanitary, and unsavory long-time employee who spends his days web-surfing and slurping vodka-laced diet sodas instead of doing any actual work. But every time you ask the guy what things will be like in 10 years in Myanmar, or Uzbekistan, or Durka-Durkastan, he jumps to the white board and gives you a detailed lecture on who is doing what when and why in those countries, and turns out to be spot-on correct every single damn time. If you are hiring, at great expense, the academic black-box people, you should, in theory, be purchasing more certainty in forecasting than you can get any time by wandering back to the cube farm with a paper bag holding an unopened bottle of Stoli. But there’s no real way to make the comparison. So you risk your employee’s internal organs only after paying the black-box people big dollars—and getting a Power Point presentation that, remarkably, looks exactly like your Stoli guy’s white board work.
Anyway. I’m not really sure how I got to wandering down the path represented by the above paragraphs. Or why I dragged you along with me. However, I can say this. It’s been a bizarre, and none-too-appetizing week here in Cancer Land (copyright, trademark).
One day I woke up to find my face and neck splotched in blood. This was somewhat frightening, although the doctors have repeatedly warned me that my throat is basically wrecked and will be inflamed and bloody for the rest of my life. But the copious fresh blood pouring from my tracheostomy tubing and throat was orders-of-magnitude over and above what seemed acceptable. Still, given the docs’ insistence that I will bleed sort of forever, I didn’t panic. Instead, I opened up a brand new fresh set of tracheostomy hardware and installed it. Within hours the massive blood-letting started to recede. By the next day, I was back to “normal” levels of gore, with pink-tinged phlegm and occasional expulsion of clotted red slime (I hope I’m not making you too uncomfortable here. I think it’s important that anyone reading this blog who might in the future have to deal with savage cancers like mine have some basis for anticipating outcomes). I have no idea why pulling the old PVC tubing (for that is what the tracheostomy hardware is) fixed the problem. But I’m a degreed empiricist, for crap’s sake. So I simply took the result as reality lacking a theoretical foundation.
Disturbingly, a few days later, the bleeding returned. The trach hardware is expensive, and I wanted to start exploring what the hell is happening in my throat when I’m bleeding like an Easter lamb slaughtered with a lockblade across the neck. So this time I yanked the tracheostomy tubing and washed it thoroughly. When I pulled it, it wasn’t particularly bad looking. No mass of microbial slime, no obvious source of pathology, no sharp edges. It cleaned up nicely. And, when it was re-inserted, the heavy bleeding wound down, back to “normal” in 8 or 10 hours.
So I have absolutely no smegging idea what the deal is with my sanguinary health.
But that was not the end of the quirky new discomforts I had to deal with. Early one morning I woke up having the first asthma attack I have had in more than 20 years! Leading me to ask this question: what the bloody frickin’ hell?!?!
I suspect the asthma attack was weather-related (hmm…global warming as a respiratory health disaster?). We had a couple days of warm, dry air. Similar weather around this time of year when I was a teenager would kickstart pollen dispersal which in turn would kickstart my bronchial inflammation. Today turned out to be cool, humid, and drizzly, the kind of weather that can clear the air of its heavy pollen burden. And today my breathing is fine. But the return of my pulmonary nemesis after all this time is disturbing. I’m already having a cascade of nasty memories of desperate, claustrophobic struggles to breathe.
Tonight, I don’t feel particularly bad. But I am little spooked, I must admit. Hopefully the asthma was a one-off. And hopefully my technological fixes for the bleeding will continue to do the job.
Because…next week’s edition of this weblog will be the first one from the BBBEEEAAACCCCCHHHHHHHHH! Beach content per se will be limited in the first dispatch from the cottage since Saturday is move-in day and I’ll probably do the writing on the drive down. But get your anticipatory juices flowing (“anticipatory juices”?!? What the hell does THAT mean???). My rebuilt respiratory system means I won’t be able to spend much time on the actual sand-blowing beach, and no time at all in the surf. So I’ll be forced…forced!...to spend the two week trip hunting reptiles and amphibians and other natural elements for photography. I’ve already gone out on a limb. I’m predicting a rattlesnake this year. Remember you heard it here first!
Thanks to you all for putting up with my recounting/whining about my continual health travails. See you next week, from a perch on the beautiful Atlantic coastal strand!
Notes
[1] http://sites.duke.edu/niou/files/2011/06/goldstone-bates-etal.pdf
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