But let’s not start there. Let’s start with traffic in endangered and threatened species. Today’s Washington Post ran a long piece on international trade in elephant ivory and rhino horn. It’s a depressing story of human stupidity and the rapacious nature of market forces. In the past few decades, the African elephant and all half-dozen or so species of rhino around the world have been decimated. “Artistic” carved ivory is one reason, but the primary one is the weird belief in China and Vietnam that rhino horn is an aphrodisiac. I mean, the stuff is keratin—horses hoofs, human fingernails, that material. How the hell can somebody in the 2000 and teens believe it’s an efficacious biologically active compound?
Anyway, when I was a kid, there was a shop in the Port Authority Terminal in New York that sold beautifully tanned red fox pelts for $5 and grey wolf pelts for $20. This was not illegal at the time, of course. My Aunt broke down on one trip into town and bought me a fox pelt. It was one of my treasured possessions for years. Eventually I used it to tie many dozens of trout flies, light cahills (always one of my favorites) with the underfur and unnamed but remarkably effective streamers from the long tail hairs. I never did save enough for a wolf pelt. Which is just as well. It was only a matter of a few years before grey wolves were listed and illegal to possess.
Fast forward 30 years or so. In Kuwait there is a shopping district about a 40 minute drive from Kuwait City that is known for shops with quality goods and decent prices. It is a mecca (so to speak) for people who can’t go to a Middle Eastern country without making an elaborate ritual of nickel-and-diming the locals on the price of sweatshop-produced rugs and then backcasting receipts so they can further nickel and dime U.S. customs when the rug is declared. Every individual I’ve been to the Muslim world with, from lawyers and international administrators to scientists, has made this odd game a focal point of their trip.
Personally, I’m not a rug guy. But the diversity of artisanal products (and associated ripoff reproductions) that passes through small shops in the souks of the Arab world is amazing. I shop for musical instruments, glassware, art, costume jewelry, interesting trinkets, etc. Most of the stuff isn’t local. But it can be outstanding if you shop with care. One of my most prized adult possessions is an Indian ritual bell, cast of pot metal, that will ring with an absolutely gorgeous G note if rubbed with a piece of wooden dowel (which the shop owner through into the bargain). I would note that on the shop shelves, there were dozens of nearly identical bells. When I looked at them and started testing their tones (which were consistently unattractive), the guy reached under his counter and pulled out the heavier, higher-quality bell I now own. I note that haggling over price is indeed a treasured ritual in the region (although I believe Americans should always overpay), and I tried to talk him down a few dinars (he quoted the same price for the quality bell as he had listed for the crappy ones). He refused, quite reasonably, to drop his price.
I seem to have gotten a little lost in story telling here…where were we? Oh yeah. Endangered species. The next trip I made to Kuwait, I went back to the bell shop. I wandered up to the second floor…and was absolutely stunned. About a quarter of the upstairs space was taken up by an enormous stack of untanned but complete wildlife skins. There was a tiger, a number of wolves, foxes and jackals, extremely rare small cats, cheetahs, and several lions that I suspect were the essentially extinct Asian subspecies (which exists only in a carefully managed population in a dedicated national park in India). The most stunning was the tiger. It was absolutely gorgeous. I must admit that I, a dedicated professional scientist and ecologist, was tempted. The price was unbelievable—the guy wanted the equivalent of $300 U.S. for it. The next day I mentioned the tiger pelt to my class. They generously offered to hold it for me if I bought it, and work on finding a way to get it to me in the States in a later diplomatic shipment (did I mention that my class was attended by high-ranking individuals?).
Eventually good sense and scientific instincts suppressed my momentary interest in becoming an international smuggler and contributor to population decimation of critically endangered charismatic megafauna.
And why am I wasting your time with rambling tales of global wildlife mismanagement rather than focusing on terminal cancer, the nominal topic of this weblog? Because there is an important medical lesson buried in the sordid story of rhino poaching and elephant hunting. For years, I’ve been holding out hope that the ridiculous but spectacularly profitable market in “erectile dysfunction” drugs (are there really that many men with some sort of inability to have sex? That just seems really unlikely, doesn’t it?) would be the salvation of pachyderms around the world. I mean, why would you pay tens of thousands of dollars for a few grams of grimy ground up rhino horn (which is also impossible to authenticate) when you could pay a few tens of dollars for a bottle of actually efficacious product over the internet?
Turns out I’m obviously wrong about this. The price of rhino horn increases daily, and the Post article cites some of the incredible values it has achieved. I guess it’s not so much a matter of whether something actually works as whether somebody believes it works.
But not in my case. Let’s come back to cancer here for just a paragraph or two. When we started this course of chemotherapy intended not to “cure” me but to give me a few comfortable months of life, I was skeptical. I mean, it was clear from the PET CT scans that large areas of my lung surfaces were affected. I didn’t really believe that weird pine-bark-derived molecules that differentially slow cell substructure assemblage (operating more effectively on cancer cells because of their enhanced metabolism) would make a damn bit of discernible difference in my health.
But it has! I have active and aggressive lung cancer, and with the chemotherapy infusions I can breathe pretty well—not much of that childhood asthma claustrophobia. And I feel generally pretty good, although I must admit I can tell that various organ systems are deteriorating over time and becoming more dysfunctional.
The only thing that’s really bothering me now is the fact that every chemo session except one has sent me to the emergency room and gotten me admitted to the hospital for periods varying from a few days to more than a week. This week’s was particularly vicious. I posted the chirpy blog entry on Saturday night. By midday Sunday I was feeling sickish. By Sunday evening I could tell I was in trouble. Around midnight, I started vomiting. Every hour or so overnight I vomited a notable quantity of blood and mucous. I became really weak, started to shake, and rapidly dehydrated. So, Monday morning, it was off to the ER. Poor Colin, who was home from Tech for his autumn break, had to spend his second visit in a row sitting for long hours watching me writhe on a stretcher in the emergency room at GBMC while they got me admitted. And I was really sick this time. It took them two full days to get me stable, partially rehydrated, and able to take necessary medications, fluids, and nutrition. By Wednesday, there was still a question as to whether I could be released this week. Finally the doctors reluctantly agreed to discharge me on Thursday.
In this case, they think I got sick from a massive infection rather than from the chemotherapy drugs. I’m now taking two serious antibiotics to get me cleared out in time for the next chemo in a couple of weeks. I must admit I’m a little suspicious, because the timing of getting sick was synchronized with the chemo just like prior episodes. But the chemo does decimate the immune system, so it’s not unlikely the docs are correct. In fact, a goodly portion of my hospital stay involved getting my white blood cell count, red blood cell count, and immune system all back into some sort of balance. I ended up getting another unit of whole blood, along with powerful drugs providing WBC support.
And today, Saturday, well I’m feeling pretty damn good. Not great, mind you. But not bad. It sure as hell could be a lot worse—like last Sunday night. Instead, I’m doing some reading, research and writing, I’ll wander around the yard looking for stuff to photograph, and I’m able to “eat” and take my meds without too much travail. And next week? I’ll introduce you to the bureaucracy involved in registering a body to be donated to the University of Maryland system for teaching or research. It’s a more interesting story than you think.
Remember everybody: use ‘em while you got ‘em. Because they are NOT forever. We’re all gonna run out of them—some of us sooner than others, of course. Have a great week everybody.
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