Statement from Dave's family

As many of you know, Dave Ludwig died yesterday almost 4 weeks to the day that he entered the hospice center. He had no pain and his breathing was comfortable before he quietly passed away. After all of the bad things that happened to him these past 4 years, it is a relief to know, as a wonderful friend said to me, that nothing bad can happen to him again. He is at peace now.

True to the way he lived his life, Dave wanted to contribute to science and learning even after his death. As he wished, his body was donated to be used for teaching or research. There will be no funeral but we will be having a celebration of his life at a later date, not yet determined. Dave has left us a list of the music to play at his party and we will be sure to toast him with his favorite cocktail – a negroni. Luckily, he taught our  youngest son, at the age of 8, to make negronis. (To his mother’s great relief, Colin did not have to write a “what I learned over the summer” essay when he  returned to school that fall.)

Dave did not have a lot of energy to spend as much time as he would have liked to travel to the shore or mountains for snake hunting and bird watching in the last couple of years. However, there was a wonderful natural area not too far from our home where he could take walks on those days when he would feel well enough to get out of the house. He would head over to it and spend time taking pictures and turning over logs and rocks looking for snakes. Many of the photographs of flowers that he added to his blog were taken on these walks. We request that if anyone wants to make a donation to honor Dave, please make it either to a charity of your choice or to the Middle Patuxent Environmental Area, Robinson Nature Center, 6692 Cedar Lane, Columbia, MD 21044. The check should be made out to MPEA and write his name on the memo line of the check or attach a note saying it is to honor David Ludwig.

These past four years have been challenging for Dave and us and it would have been unbearable except for the love and caring that you all have shown us. Whatever form your thoughts for us took, we drew strength from them and we want to thank you with all of our hearts.

Love,

Cathy, Molly, Jesse, and Colin

Well, it has been 2 weeks since Dave was transferred from the hospital to the hospice center and each day has brought new challenges. There have been days when he slept all day and most of the night. Lately, there have been days when he hasn't slept at all. It has become increasingly difficult for him to communicate through writing, especially when he has gone without sleep. The doctor thinks the cancer has spread to his brain. Some days he is clear headed but there are many during which he is confused. He is compelled to write on his pad constantly but it is usually, though not always, incomprehensible. It will be a jumble of letters, often repeated, or he will start a sentence but he will lose focus and not be able to complete it. He knows what he wants to say so he gets very frustrated and angry that he cannot translate it onto paper. He certainly recognizes all of us and anyone who comes to visit him. He is no longer able to read. We have been able to get him outside a little bit in the small courtyard here. He is really weak so we put him in a wheelchair and push him around.

The staff here are wonderful. They are so caring and attentive, especially to keeping Dave comfortable, but also to us. Dave's family are all here and spend most of the day with him. Molly has taken off from work and does all of the grocery shopping and cooking, bringing dinner here where we 'party' every evening. Copious quantities of alcohol are consumed and we fill the room with laughter, often playing Scrabble, and suffering while we watch the Orioles.

We are taking it all day by day. The doctor has not given us a timeline for what is going to happen but we are pretty sure it will not be a whole lot longer- whatever that means.

As you have probably been able to tell from the long absence, Dave isn't doing so well. He's in hospice surrounded by his famiy.

Apology Foreword

I open with a note of apology. For the ongoing and multiple years battle with cancer, I have set this blog at a high priority for getting into print by Sunday (at the latest. Many of the entries make it by Saturday night). For its entire life, except for a few times when the blog has been overridden by a perfect storm of “facts on the ground,” it’s been Priority One, challenging whatever fog of medicines, treatments, ongoing pain and discomfort, new pains and discomforts, inability to hike and general crankiness that go with terminal illness. 

Besides, I figured, it was an easy way for people to know I’m Not Dead Yet. A quick look at the blog, and whatever gibberish may be there (we’ll return to that point in a few minutes), at least you know enough shards of me exist to get stuff blurted into an MS Word file. 

I’ve maintained this procedure through 2 full rounds of radiation and chemo. Last week, in a stealth move, the doctors had me in the hospital for a variety of minor physical tune up items. Before they could finish up and get me back on the road, they went ahead and pumped me full of chemotherapy toxins. I barely recall it happening. The nurse hooked me up at around 2 a.m. By dawn, my brain was re-scrambled and the physical impacts of the treatment were starting to manifest. Having the chemo done as an inpatient had innumerable benefits. The docs could monitor and respond to pain, dehydration, nutrient imbalances, vomiting and nausea. The chemo still beat the shit out of me. In fact, today is the first day I can say that I’m back to a “normal” level of pain and discomfort, and able to sit and write. Obviously blowing the whole theory of the regular-like-clockwork blog indicating I’m alive. So I’ve screwed up royally here. But honestly, I forgot (or suppressed) how savage the chemo was. 

Thus, it’s taken me until now to get this into print. My deepest apologies to all!

Back to Normal-ish Blog Update

The pot of contagion in the human ecosystem is stirring itself into existence. The slow cooker of pathogenic microbes (from viruses through bacteria to protozoans), plus a big-ass bucket of multicellular organism that we (“we” in this case stands for old and cranky parasitologists) used to lump together as “worms”. Some of the latter are the weirdest damn things your imagination could conjure. Don’t think for an instant that the creatures of the “Aliens” cinematic franchise are anywhere near as extreme as the living yield of the evolutionary dance between hosts and parasites right here in River City, on earth, right the hell in front of us. Where we got two drinking bars, and that starts with B and that sounds like T and that stands for trouble. 

Now, in addition to diseases and parasite loads, an emergent property of modern ecosystems is the redistribution of human beings across the biosphere. Some of you may recall that I’ve been bitching about this in publications and presentations for decades. The issue is simple, and represents a logical inevitability. Having visited impoverished communities in the tropics and near-tropics of Asia, the Middle East, the Americas, and Europe, one factor overrides all others—information. Take a walk through a couple of the larger, older souks any city in the Muslim world, or, now, some of the outer ethnic suburbs of the enormous megacities of Europe, Asia, and the Americas.  When you get back to your hotel, sit at the bar with an iced fresh mango juice (everywhere) or a Negroni or Mojito (in countries allowing visitors to consume alcohol) and think quietly for an hour or so about what you’ve seen.

What you’ve observed is this. Everybody, from those living in extreme poverty, to those stressed but hanging on to a difficult middle class have access to English and local language Al Jazeera, CNN, networks (parent holding companies) news and opinion broadcasts, etc. In short, the more than TWO BILLION people living at or below the U.N. and World Bank poverty threshold, see perfectly clearly on the screen at the neighborhood waterpipe emporium that pretty much everybody north of the tropic lives in relatively clean, dry, safe-ish conditions with opportunities to rise economically at least theoretically achievable. And they don’t.

My vaguely alarmist theory foresaw millions of environmental refugees pouring north. Because if your choice is to watch CNN in a damp mud-floored hut where malaria (or worse. See, for example, River Blindness) is endemic, emergent diseases jump from wild and feral animals to humans and back again (see hemorrhagic virus for a scary glance into that world), potable water doesn’t exist, economic opportunities are somebody else’s…and the list goes on. Live in shit and watch your kids explode their lives in work, illness, and a 24/7 search for food and water? Or consider the possibility of raising them in London, Paris, Copenhagen, Hamburg?

Well, duh. Time to wrap the last couple of cut down paint cans used for cooking pots, pay off the smuggler, and get on the overcrowded boat to Sicily. Maybe we make it in. Maybe we don’t. At least we have something to focus on besides mud, malaria, and finding sufficient twigs to boil water to drink for one more night.

Ah. We already live in the clean northern world. And it’s a good thing, because Your Obedient Servant (that would be me) has been stricken with a particularly complex and dangerous illness. The kind of thing where, if I didn’t have health insurance, or lived in a country lacking high-powered medical talent wielding high-powered medical tools, I would have been dead years ago.

Next up is a continuation for 5 more infusions of the chemotherapy drugs. The impacts of the drugs themselves on my physiology are extreme and difficult to tolerate. Having been in the hospital (by chance) for the first application in this series, I can see a lot of advantages in being treated as an in-patient. As doctors point out, insurance won’t pay for such in-patient treatment. This despite the fact that every other chemo infusion I’ve had through 2 full courses has put me in the hospital, usually via the Emergency Room. I see no reason to anticipate that this round is going to be any different. Likely we’ll follow the same path as before. A couple of nasty, painful, disgusting days immediately following treatment, a determination that I’m dehydrated and cursed with intractable vomiting, a trip to the ER, admission to hospital for several days to get physiological wreckage back on track. 

We do have an advantage this time, and it’s something that worked pretty well getting me through the last round of chemo. With the assistance of a home-visit nurse, Cathy has been trained to administer intravenous fluids and even i.v. treatment drugs. This certainly has the potential to ease our way into this round of chemotherapy. 

OK, sports fans. My deepest apologies to all for being so late with this report. I am indeed alive. Difficult as I find it to say this, we’ve already stepped onto the treadmill for a 3rd round of chemotherapy. We’ll just have to let this one play out. It’s a fair bet it won’t be pretty. But, translated into an uncensored weekly weblog, it can it least be entertaining. Be here next week everybody—I will not be late with next week’s entry, unless something untoward (correct idiom?) occurs. In such an event, I or one of my children will get a quick note up to get information out. So rock and roll. And use ‘em while you got ‘em. Remember, your drummer could spontaneously combust at any time (cross-reference Spinal Tap. Frequently. Along with a couple liters of really good beer. My love to everyone!!!

It Might Get Messy

Commander Cody got lost in the ozone…repeatedly. Eric Clapton could hammer the shit out of a Stratocaster, but never could figure out a mature and satisfactory approach to sexual relationships. Kurt Cobain was a lost-cause genius from the drop of the flags, as much as Einstein was an eternal genius who will be with us until we are no longer us. And me? I spend a lot of time in the hospital for various reasons ranging from the mundane to the truly quirky.

This week I’m here for several reasons. My breathing declined rapidly earlier, as fluid built up in the chest cavity around the lungs. For immediate relief, the fluid needed to be drained (simple process), but the source of the fluid, increased cancer growth in the lungs, had to be dealt with. Simultaneously, the feeding tube apparatus in my gut finally gave up its functional ghost and had to be removed and replaced—not a simple operation under any circumstances. And, as long as I was hangin’ at the hospital, the good doc figured we might as well go ahead and get me started on a new round of cancer-suppressing chemotherapy, on the theory that the last round bought me some nice months of comfortable and happy time with my family and friends, and another round could do the same. Particularly if we took the clues regarding drug cocktail contents in an attempt to reduce ugly side effects associated with the chemo infusion.

So. Here I am. Again. Probably well north of a dozen admissions in. Yesterday they undertook the painful effort to yank the golf-ball-sized feeding apparatus from the tiny hole in my gut, and replaced it with an easier-fitting alternative. Late last night (around 2 a.m.) they started the chemotherapy infusion. An hour later and I was pretty well zonkered. Stayed that way until nearly 10 this morning, at which point the nurse kicked me into gear and got me medicated, liquidated, and fed, and the technical assistant held me down for a thorough sponge bath and change of bedding. 

So, assuming my health doesn’t collapse any from here and I remain free of ugly impacts of the chemotherapy, I should be able to go home tomorrow to hang with my guitars and drum pads in the corner of the room. If I continue to feel this good, I might be able to rebuild some strength between every-three-week doses of chemo drugs. If the chemo drugs don’t pound my health (Dr. T made a substantial cut in the amount of the suspected culprit causing the repeated nausea in prior applications), this could be a real nice success story in the history of my cancer process.

We’ll see. For the moment, I’m alive, cogent, able to keep you somewhat up-to-date. You have my love and gratitude. Use ‘em while you got ‘em, everybody. Clearly they are not forever. But they’re all you get. Talk to you next week!

It Might Get Messier

And it certainly will at some point. The question is, are we at that point? And the short answer is—I have no frickin’ idea. The past few days, I’ve been feeling really crappy. But in a kind of generic, nonspecific, can’t really pinpoint particular symptoms, kind of way. Which, oddly, makes the prospect of ill health more frightening than if there was something identifiable and specific to trigger concern. That’s because I have so many areas of cancer loci in my lungs and chest cavity that I’m not going to die from one or two high-powered tumors. Rather, at some point, the entire malignant mess will get its collective shit together and start robbing my physiology of important components of life.

I saw the oncologist yesterday, and we put together a package of diagnostics to try to get  handle on what the hell is going on. Friday I’ll get blood drawn, Monday have a CT scan, and a couple days later meet with the oncologist to discuss the radiologist’s report. If I continue to feel generally icky without particular things getting specifically worse, the conclusion may be ugly. Although as oncologist Dr. T points out, it’s been 6 months since my last chemotherapy infusion, which in theory means it should be as effective if applied again. Of course, it hammered the shit out of me itself and left me repeatedly hospitalized. But it did indeed knock back the cancer. So things aren’t necessarily totally dark even under worst-case conditions.

But we’ll just have to see. For this week and next, I’m just going to update this weblog with brief notes and progress reports. After we get through the radiology, I’ll go back to the more illuminating and interesting presentation format. For the moment, I thank you all for being here with me. With a little luck, I may be with you for at least a while longer!

It Might Get Messy

As some of you have no doubt deduced, all is not well in Cancer Land (trade mark, copyright) this week. There seems to be a general buildup of unattractive and dangerous goop affecting important components of my physiological infrastructure. At this point, I have no idea what is happening, why, and what the implications are.

I’m heading for the oncologist’s office now. She’ll probably adjust the meds, but has no new diagnostic data to help her figure our what the disease is doing. So I’m basically expecting to get a date established for a PET/CT scan. Which  means if I continue to be uncomfortable, by next week, we should have a handle regarding what’s going on. And what, if anything, can be done about it. Check in next week for a detailed exposition of what goes down and how bad it is. Otherwise, keep on rockin’  everybody. Important for people our age!










1

It Might Get Messy

A long time ago, in a galaxy far, far away, a “Death Star”, a large-scale Leggo-like construct holding a sort of death-ray thingie of unkown technology destroyed the densely inhabited planet Alderaan, home of Princess Leia Organa. Of course, once the Rebel Alliance got a copy of the blueprints, it turned out there was a special on/off, or EZ Destruct, switch attached to a little vent hole on the surface of the Leggo assemblage. At the cost of a few fighters and their pilots, experienced “Womp Rat” hunter Luke Skywalker dropped an explosive device down the vent, eliminating the Death Star threat to the rebellion. 

Flash forward to the moist, muddy, and seemingly endless wetlands north of New Orleans, Louisiana, some decades ago. At the close of a long-day’s exploration of access points for an upcoming impact assessment, we had an oddball assemblage in the rental car. First, there was me. Then there was the client, a biologist employed by the headquarters operation of the owner of the local facility (for some perspective, a regular reader of this column, former inhabitant of Taiga Forest landscape in northern New England, now splitting time between humid Texas coast, Alaskan tundra, and same Taiga camp, is now employed by same company). And there was the driver, at that time my boss and a senior consultant specializing in sediment management issues. He was, at the time of this adventure in the sticky deep south, in the early stages of becoming a “Consultant for the Lord”, which his business cards now actually state (I swear to…uh…well, God, I suppose…). He was fairly annoying at that time. But in comparison, his present persona is nothing less than frightening. And not just because of the “Consulting for the Lord” business cards. He is raising an adopted child, and when he wanders off into endless stories about the young man’s difficulties, the vocal inflection when he refers to his “step son” truly make the hairs on the back of my neck stand up. 

So we’re flashing across one of the long, long causeways that allow motorized vehicles to cross the enormous forested wetlands characteristic of the region. And suddenly traffic grinds to a complete halt. We are the lead vehicle in a long line of cars looking at the immediate aftermath of a really nasty accident that happened moments before during the intense thunderstorm that blew across the landscape. It’s a little hard to put together precisely what happened. But from what we could see, there was a young woman with blood pouring down one side of her face, screaming hysterically and periodically peering into the passenger side of her flipped-over, aged VW bug. There was a double-rigged long-haul truck, jackknifed around the VW, with the young driver in a rain jacket on the phone sounding rather hysterical himself. 

So, our “Christian” leader makes his snap judgement of the situation: “well, looks like they have things under control here. Guess we’ll just drive through carefully and keep going”. My jaw dropped and I stared at him. I came very, very close to punching him out. Instead I said “No, we need to help here”. I jump out of the car into the pouring rain. I grab the lady from the VW, who has a deep cut—exposing bone on both her forehead and her cheek—across her left eye. Remarkably, her eye seemed to be intact. Which was good—my limited “first responder” abilities don’t include any notion of what to do about a slashed eye. The girl was clearly sinking into shock. I made the trucker give me his rain jacket, wrapped the girl in it, and handed her over to a nurse who wandered up out of the line of cars. The girl now started yelling about “Pedro”. I mean really, really yelling. And crying. And shaking. I look in the VW at the passenger side. Nobody there. Back to the girl. “Is Pedro with you? Was he in the passenger seat? How old is he?” Girl looks at me as her eyes glaze over when she begins to pass out. “Pedro is my parrot. In his cage. Please find him. Please find him. Please fffiiii….” . Bang. She’s passed out on the nurse’s lap. I go back to the car. No bird cage. I search the debris field of shattered bits of VW and industrial-steel components of the truck. No bird cage. I get a bad feeling. I look over the rail of the causeway into the dark water below. No bird cage. But at least half a dozen large- to very-large alligators, plus an uncountable contingent of small ‘gators. I swear they were smiling. I go back to the girl, who is drifting in and out of consciousness. “Did you find Pedro?” Not really certain what to say, I try: “Uh…I think Pedro might have escaped.” Thankfully, before she could pursue the line of questioning any further, she passed back out.

By this time, the State Police, the Sheriff, and the ambulances showed up. Cop asked me what happened. I told him I had no frickin’ idea. He said “Oh, good Samaritan, huh? Thanks. We got it.” I gave him one of my soaked-and-falling apart business cards just in case and let our “Christian” leader continue with the journey back into town. He asked me to join him for dinner. I told him I was getting room service and watching TV.

We couldn’t know at that time that a Death Star in the form of Hurricane Katrina would soon devastate Planet New Orleans…well, yes, I suppose we could have. In fact, the organization that coughed up my “Consulting in the Name of the Lord” boss had intimate responsibility for same. Possibly explaining a lot more than I’m comfortable even thinking about.

So, here I sit, perched in my hospital-style bed in the corner of the living room. Had a semi-Death Star experience this morning when I kicked over the large pitcher of water I need to eat and take meds. Fortunately, no electronics were in the direct line of fire, although my tough little Roland Micro Cube amplifier took a bit of liquid. 

But the more critical potential aspects of Death Star Destruction—such as the reappearance of clear, undeniable symptoms of active, spreading malignancy—continued this week to keep their butts out of my face. As I’ve said repeatedly in this odd interregnum between my healthy, functional life and my soon-to-be nasty and messy death, not only do I not know what’s going on, but my doctors don’t, either. They (the docs) clearly expected me to be dead by now. It’s been more than 13 months since the medical consensus on the longest I should expect to live was 13 months. I continue to live with the physical difficulties of years-long cancer and cancer treatments. Breathing difficulty, energy difficulty, weakness, various pains, tendency to vomit for no good reason, inability to walk more than a few hundred meters under the best possible conditions. I continue to struggle to maintain my weight. I’m afraid I’m losing that battle. I just can’t digest enough of this milky goo to make enough room in my gut to pump in enough to provide the extra calories needed to maintain, or, more desirably, gain, weight. 

However. When the malignancy does indeed return to wreak vengeance on my physiology, my body weight will seem like a trivial issue. In fact, depending on whether it’s even possible to treat whatever form and location sprouts the next batch of cancer, when it becomes time for me to let go of this life and see if I can locate Pedro in the next one, unless Maryland passes the physician-assisted euthanasia bills pending in the State Legislature (and there is a realistic possibility of that, apparently. Seems a little too enlightened for a state with a Republican governor, but he himself just began a course of treatment for leukemia), there may be hope. Because the way you die if you can’t get access to a lethal dose of powerful opiates is to simply refuse food and water. A couple days later, you’re outta here.

But I’m not outta here anytime soon. Just waiting for the return of blood in the sputum and painful inflammation in my oral cavity and/or thoracic infrastructure. When that happens, you all will be among the first to know. You’ve been fantastic to hang with me this long, and I’m convinced you’re an enormous part of why I’m still here.

So, use ‘em while you got ‘em, my friends. They’re not cumulative. Find something funny, and find something to learn, every day. And please let me know about it. You know where to find me!

Apologies for the lack of photos this week. I’m having some software issues. I’ll sort ‘em out by next week. Rock and roll, everybody!!!

It Might Get Messy

As I excavated the file structure to dig up the early notes compiled for this week’s entry, I passed the folder of weblog and a separate health update email for the 4th of July week last year. I paid my ticket and piled into the little carnival car for the trip through the cheesy County Fair House of Horrors ride. It seemed like a good idea at the time. In truth, it turned out to be a scary visit to what ubiquitous TV commercials for “Cancer Treatment Centers of America” insist on calling a “journey”. Of course, because of basic physical laws and the enormous entropy engine that is our universe, past is prologue. We’ll revisit this point momentarily. 

First, however, I had an exchange with much esteemed Dr. Crossley, my major professor at the University of Georgia. We covered a lot of interesting rhetorical ground. We’ll revisit this conversation in a later entry to this blog. For the moment, it is relevant that DAC and I commiserated over the difficult logistics of travel here in the post-9/11 world, especially for those of us who are old and/or sick. Note that DAC is not only not sick, he keeps a prolific professional and personal schedule demonstrating clearly that calendar age has nothing to do with being “old”. He writes novels of the Olde West, with a focus on Texas, his favorite setting. His novels, including Revenge of the Texas Ranger, Guns of the Texas Ranger (The Border Trilogy), Code of the Texas Ranger, Escape from the Alamo, Guns Across the Rio, and Return of the Texas Ranger, are excellent, action-packed, written under the nom de plume DAC Crossley, and generally available via Amazon at 

http://www.amazon.com/gp/search/ref=sr_gnr_fkmr0?rh=i%3Astripbooks%2Ck%3ACrossley+Texas&keywords=Crossley+Texas&ie=UTF8&qid=1436126099

At the same time, DAC continues to make frequent technical contributions, both by updating his books on soil ecosystems and by frequently publishing descriptions of new mite species. 

But that’s not why we’re here (at least not today). Today we’re here for the usual weekly update on my condition (calling it “health” at this point would perhaps be over-optimistic), with consideration of the historical artifacts I’ll be leaving behind  (almost all of them in the basement now). In particular, I’ve been attempting to sort through the several hundred 35mm color film slides I accumulated back when analog technology was all we had available. 

Among the more interesting components of the collection are a number of photos of the Soviet/Russian military hardware (tanks, self-propelled artillery, big guns, armored assault vehicles, trucks) shot up by U.S. air forces on the highway north of Kuwait City as the Iraqis attempted to retreat with their hardware intact from the ridiculous and pointless destruction of Kuwaiti infrastructure. Some of these photographs are awesome. The heavy frontal armor on Soviet main battle tanks was on the order of nearly a foot thick. Where spent-uranium anti-armor projectiles hit this heavy stuff, the metal melted and cooled in place, leaving a really frightening “splash” of steel frozen like a bad sculpture in an East Village gallery on a summertime Saturday night (nobody is in NYC on summertime Saturdays. It is prime opportunity for marginal artists…a category with whom I feel deep kinship…to display their prowess. And/or lack of same). Most of the tanks had been taken through the thinner, largely ineffective, armor on the rear surfaces. But man, there sure as hell was a shitload of beaten and broken weapons of war spread out in miles-long windrows across the dry sands of the western Kuwait desert. 

After I get these slides in to be professionally digitized, I will post some of the best here and/or at revived versions of the other 3 weblogs comprising my once-active blog empire. In the meantime, it may occur to you to wonder: “what the hell was Ludwig doing in the Kuwait desert wandering around shot-to-hell Iraqi weapons of war?” As you will discern from the following brief, that’s not even the most fun part of my adventure with armed military in Kuwait… .

On one of my trips to Kuwait (I was teaching two-week courses at the Kuwait Academy of Sciences) I got my travel screwed up. Had to arrive on the same flight but a day later than originally scheduled. Of course I notified my boss (guy from UMass who set the courses up) and hotel. So when I got off the plane there was a driver with a "Doctor Ludwig" sign. So I grabbed him and we went on into the city. Many misadventures later, it was time to leave Kuwait and head back to the real world. So I go to the airport for the midnight flight, hand over my ticket and passport, and… within 15 seconds there is a full squadron of large, leather-skinned men in body armor with carbon-fiber weapons explaining in the nicest possible tones of voice that I needed to go with them. Immediately.

Turns out, of course, that when I came into the country without my experienced compatriot, and found the driver, I completely bypassed the brief but oh-so-necessary stop at the Visa station. So here are these military guys with me, a valid passport, a return flight ticket, and, as they kept repeating, (while feeding me gallons of sweet spiced tea and reflexively slipping the safeties on the carbon-fiber weapons off and on) that they had "no record of me coming in to the country". This was a very uncomfortable position (well, except for the tea) to be in. Compounding the problem, because they couldn't assure themselves that my flight OUT of the country didn't have something to do with my successful infiltration in, they locked down the big airplane full of Brits and Aussies who were all absolutely desperate to get wheels up so they could start to drink. I had no idea what to do, although if it looked like they were going to book me, I planned to "accidentally" strip the 35 mm film out of my camera because it had a very nice photo of the sign at the Saudi Border saying "NO PHOTOGRAPHY", and I didn't think that the possibility that I had hiked up the coastal dunes after walking across the southern border would go over very well with the gentlemen with the body armor and carbon fiber weapons. 

Anyway, after a couple of hours of discussions with the KFAS people (all of whom, I am certain, were sound asleep when this problem came to their attention at around 0130 local time) the military guys relented and put me on the plane. And it was only after we had wheels up and a third glass of wine that I remembered my 35 mm film also included 50 or 60 close-up photos of the Soviet tanks, armored cars, and artillery destroyed by U.S. air forces on the nighttime highway at the end of the war. Oh, plus, our driver got us past security at the miles long windrows of twisted and melted metal by telling the guards in the concrete bunker with the Browning .50 caliber...no carbon fibers out there in the sand...that we were former U.S. Marines who wanted to relive our glory days. Realistically, I could still be in some dark, deep, dry dungeon in the desert. And I bet the tea wouldn't have been nearly as good... .

Anyway. As you know from my whining much earlier in the “cancer process”, the loss of ability to travel is one of the most difficult things for me to accept and live with. I’m gonna have to revisit travel adventures and older photographs. Good thing I have copious quantities of both. 

Once again this week, I have not had the kind of health crisis that would indicate the many incipient malignancies occupying my internal thoracic surfaces have sprouted to life and commenced the hostile takeover of my already-none-too-comfortable body. I do seem to be more dependent on the supplemental oxygen than I have been. If I forget to strap on the mask for an hour or more, I start to struggle to breathe. I do not know if this is an indicator of more serious underlying problems. My breaths remain strong and clear, which at least suggests that the partial collapse of my lungs—where dorsal and ventral surfaces have met and remained, depriving me of the benefit of such affected areas—has not gotten more severe. Among other indicators, production of thick, sticky mucous is way down in volume, and there is no blood in the phlegm or saliva. This is a Good Thing.

Almost exactly a year ago, we had made a couple of visits to an older thoracic surgical specialist, as the younger Dr. H was out on vacation. The older guy told us in a sad tone of voice that “people in your condition have lifetimes measured in months, not years”. When Dr. H returned and we asked him directly, he said the very longest I could possibly expect to live would be 13 months. With a much higher probability at the bell of the curve, on the order of 6 to 7 months. 

So, by medical reckoning, I’m well past my sell-by date and, to put it bluntly, should be dead. Of course, I should also be in a Kuwaiti black ops site somewhere in the western desert, still attempting to learn basic Arabic from the unseen and unknown guy in the adjoining cell. 

A few photos follow to reward your patience. Now I can’t wait to get these slides of the blown-to-hell tanks digitized. Because, while I don’t have many of them left, I have every intention of using them while I got them. Because they don’t keep well in the long haul. Although realistically the “long haul” is also likely an overestimate… . 

One of the most incredible feats of biology is the transformation of moths and butterflies from slow crawling caterpillar to winged and free-flying adult. Just think what happens. The caterpillar hatches from its egg (laid earlier that year, in some cases the previous year and left to over-winter). Immediately, it starts stuffing its face. It eats at a frantic pace, chewing off hunks of plants (for most caterpillars, the range of vegetation consumed is specialized, sometimes as single-mindedly as Giant Pandas, eating only one species of plant) and processing them physiologically as fast as its gut can work. Then, one day in late summer or autumn, the caterpillar feels a change coming on. When the hormones of change reach a certain level, the caterpillar can no longer resist them. It stops feeding and starts building, crafting a little one-room domicile from its own silk and often fragments of the environment. When the cocoon is ready for occupation, the caterpillar settles down inside and passes out. While it’s unconscious, all of its muscles and internal organs—everything inside its skin—liquefy. The caterpillar literally digests itself. It is no longer a recognizable caterpillar, but a few milliliters of thick, protein-rich goo. Then, somehow, the goo itself starts to reformulate. Structures in the digested liquid caterpillar called “imaginal disks” take over the operation. The imaginal disks activate some of those proteins and direct the digested goo to produce the various parts of an adult moth or butterfly. Having digested itself and transformed itself, the former caterpillar busts out of the chrysalis its skin has become, and slips out of the cocoon like a guy with a pan of brownies and power tools in an upstate maximum security prison.

The (almost always) winged adult flies away to complete its life cycle. Some adults feed voraciously, some don’t bother at all, having pumped in sufficient calories acquired by the larva (that is, the caterpillar). The adults mate, lay eggs, and die, having formulated the recipe and ingredients for another generation of adults to appear from the digested goop of the prior.

In the 1960s and ‘70s, many of us thought (or maybe felt) that the incredible transformation of butterflies and moths could be an analog of human society. Hell, we thought, if a frickin’ insect can make that kind of change, then we can as well. Most of us avoided the obvious flaw in this concept—that for butterflies to transform, they had to be broken down to a soupy elixir. Granted, some of the more radical among us thought destructive anarchy might be a necessary step in the process, leading to incidents of murder and mayhem by people who otherwise believed humanity was headed for Nirvana-like status. But those were aberrations. We were on our way, we thought, to a higher plane of existence.

Then the shit started to rain. 

• JFK killed in a bloody froth of brains and skull fragments. 
• City police raid the Stonewall Inn, a comfortable club setting for gay society. The patrons, having had enough of the constant harassment of law enforcement agencies, fought back. Five days of riots triggered death and destruction where love—or at least a safe place to hook up—otherwise prevailed. 
• Hell’s Angels motorcycle gang, hired informally for “security” at an outdoor concert headlined by the Stones and paid in cases of beer, fatally stab an audience member at Altamont Speedway
• LBJ’s intent to craft a more humane and inclusive society was derailed by the nightmare of Vietnam. Said nightmare took 58,000 American lives, hundreds of thousands of Vietnamese (not to mention Lao and Cambodian) lives, and ripped open the fabric of American society. All for a truly stupid endeavor in a conflict in which the U.S. had no compelling interest whatsoever. 
• U.S. and Soviet Union amass incredible destructive power in thousands of fission and fusion weapons. Had JFK and Nikita Kruschev not had the foresight to ignore the warmongering advice of their own staffs, the crisis of Soviet Intercontinental Ballistic Missiles in Cuba would have triggered the use of the weapons stockpiles to devastate human society.
• The movement toward civil rights for minority citizens crashed and burned against a solid wall of bigotry, hatred, and fear
• Martin Luther King, Jr. was gunned down on a hotel balcony in Mempis
• RFK was gunned down in a hotel in Los Angeles
• Students at Kent State University in Ohio were shot down in the streets by their own government 
• Palestinian terrorists bring murder and mayhem to the 1972 Olympic Games in Munich
• A seemingly minor bit of burglary brings down the Nixon administration and further—aided and abetted by Stonewall, civil rights atrocities, Kent State and more--crater the formerly comfortable relationship between law officers and the public who pay their salaries
• Massive genocide grips Cambodia in the wake of the Vietnam war
• Stephen Biko is tortured to death by the apartheid government of South Africa
• A wall insulating West Berlin from East Germany is constructed, closed, and used as an excuse to kill citizens attempting to leave the East for the West

Awright, that’s enough of that. I’m getting the same queasy feeling now that I had when all this shit was pouring from the skies like an unstoppable attack of Ju-87 dive bomber airplanes used to terrorize doomed populations across Europe as Nazi Germany gave face to the dark (really, really dark) side of humanity. 

In the interim from 1980 to now, it seemed like the evil that clawed its way over, under, and into human society was consolidating its stranglehold. Yeah, the Berlin Wall came down and “communist” governments fell. But AIDS evolved from a rare condition of African primates to a serious public health crisis for human beings. Famines struck Africa and parts of Asia. Chinese society more-or-less digested itself, killing millions and never emerging from its soupy environmental and social nightmares…and on and on, yadda yadda yadda… .

We, the people of peace, tolerance, and at least half a brain, were relegated to the sidelines. Viewed by aging politicians and citizens of what we ironically call the “American Heartland” as dangerous, anti-U.S. traitors. Dick Cheney was elected Vice President and promptly flushed the country down the toilet of war. Which was (and remains) fine with Dick and his buddies. They have no vested interest in “winning” and/or ending the wars they precipitated. They just want to get rich providing fuel, weapons, and mass commodities to the war machine. Eisenhower’s “Military Industrial Complex” not only became reality, it was viewed as forward movement of society by aging politicians (think G.H.W. Bush, John Boehner, G. W. Bush, et. al) and right on approximately 50% of U.S. citizens (that figure continues to pertain). 

So. When he have a run that clears the table like we’ve had recently—symbols of Confederate apartheid becoming social anathema, health care expanded to pick up more than 10 million people who otherwise would have continued to function without, the SCOTUS recognizing the bigotry, hatred, and stupidity of arguments against inclusive marriage, tossing the decades of childish idiocy relative to Cuba onto the trash heap of history, et al., it’s a real shock to people of my generation. But one hell of a positive, unexpected, and delightful shock.

And the concept of “delightful shock” brings us neatly to the purpose of this weblog—keeping track of me and my cancers. For another surprising week, overt symptoms of malignancy have failed to appear. Making this one more week that my doctors can notch on their stethoscopes. 

Of course, with a case of serious, ongoing, and destined without doubt to be lethal cancers, all is not sweetness and light. Even on the most comfortable summer days, when it’s cool (well, relatively cool), I need to spend the bulk of my time indoors hooked up to an oxygen concentrator. It only takes a few breaths of pollen-rich outside air to trigger a sore and inflamed throat, massive and immediate generation of masses of mucous, and the initial signs of anoxia. So, I ain’t gettin’ much exercise. Which I do desperately need. On the flip side, of course, that I’m alive and sufficiently cogent to perceive environmental conditions is a huge win for the good guys (that is, the awesome medical team who have given me several months of relative comfort beyond what their own estimates of my survival potential was). 

And then there’s the logistics problems. Of necessity, my private health insurance is ending and we now need to find, buy, and enroll in health insurance for Cathy, Jesse, and Colin. This is a big expense, although, having had the financial planners run a sort of profit and loss model including this seismic shift in health care, it appears that we will be just fine financially. While the family is shifting to private insurance, I believe I am being shunted onto medicare. Which means I need supplemental insurance to backstop the medicare. Which is just the kind of nitpicky, organizational, detailed operation that I really suck at. Hopefully Cathy, who has my power-of-attorney, can deal with some of it. 

All this health care crap is, of course, triggered by the fact that I am still alive. Having planned things expecting me to be dead by late last year, we have to scramble now to catch up to the new reality. Which is that I am NOT DEAD YET!!! Yeah. I’ll trade some logistical contretemps for additional time to live. And since the docs were so successful, my discomfort and pain levels are under control. So, at least for the moment, things here in Cancer Land (trademark, copyright) haven’t changed much. I’m going to see my Oncologist in a few weeks, for both a brief examination and renewal of the prescriptions for federally controlled substances (that is, the pain meds). She has yet to reach the point where her curiosity gets the best of her and she sends me in for diagnostic CT/PET scans. She is puzzled, though, that I’m doing so well. She knows there are incipient and/or fully armed and operational death star…uh, I mean armed and operational malignancies throughout my lungs and chest cavity (at least. Probably elsewhere—liver comes specifically to mind, in prior PET scans a region of my liver was lighted up like FAO Schwartz in Manhattan during the week before Christmas. 

So. When we failed to change the world when the opportunity presented itself in the 1960s and 70s, I recalibrated my expectations for the rest of my life. I resigned myself to the fact that I was not going to live to see an African-American President of the U.S. That we would continue to shed millions and millions of people from functional access to health care. That the social savagery of white southern Yahoos with confederate flags on their trucks would continue to intimidate. That marriage as a process would continue to be owned and operated by bigots who find homosexuality too icky to be graced by marriage. And on and on.

But, my doctors kept me alive long enough to see the social upheavals of the past few weeks. And I am really, really grateful for that.

As I am for the support from everyone out there in weblog land. You have my thanks. And I remind you: use ‘em while you got ‘em. They are a perishable commodity. So rock and roll here on the rapidly transforming earth. Maybe…just maybe…human society is not just a doomed accident of evolutionary processes. One message to take from the past few weeks is that we are NOT doomed (that’s a collective “we”. I, personally, am doomed, and destined to check out in the not-to-far-distant future. You all will be around hopefully much longer than that). Maybe humanity can sort out its social and ecological problems, and get a seat at the table for a long, long game of Low Chicago. I hope so. I’d push all my chips in now. But you all can horde them for a while. I love you all. Check back here next week. I’ll try to keep the column to a more compact and readable couple of pages. With so much happening this week, it seemed necessary to run over my word limit. ROCK AND ROLL, everybody!!!

PS—a few celebratory photos immediately below.

It Might Get Messy

A long, long time ago, in a galaxy far, far away (that would be Tulsa, Oklahoma, which, if it’s not in a different galaxy, is certainly in some alternative universe where hand-tooled boots made of exotic leathers including, based on my questioning of wearers, ostrich, alligator, crocodile, python, bison, shark, zebra, stingray, and dozens more are preferred, if not mandated, workday wear for the suit-and-tie crowd. Actually, if I recall correctly, men uniformly wore boots, women were split among heels and boots, same leathers for both) I was engaged to assist a law firm submit comments to regulatory authorities on a report addressing environmental issues involving one of the law firm’s major clients. The lawyers set up the project the old-fashioned way—a partner, another relatively senior attorney, a couple of legal assistants, a couple of technical experts (one was an in-house GIS guy, the other one was me), a secretary and a document preparation specialist all prepared to work (and more importantly, bill) 24/7 right up to the last possible instant that the product could be delivered to the regulators. In this case, that turned out to be 7 or 8 days running. We took over a large conference room, scattered our technical materials (papers, books, maps, more reports, copies of applicable regulations, etc.) on the table, chairs, and floor, and got down to work. 

We got started around 9 every morning (I passed the only Starbucks on the walk from my hotel, so I showed up with gallons of coffee), and shut it down around midnight. We had pizza, pasta, Chinese, sushi, or barbecue shipped in every evening so we could “work” through supper. Then we did the drill. We turned the barely-legible marginal notes that we had marked up report copies with into a formal set of numbered, checked, cross-checked, edited, and nicely produced comments for submittal to the government. The process involved discussion, argument, writing, re-writing, re-discussing, re-arguing, about every word and punctuation mark in the subject report. And then subjecting our draft comments to the same painful “methodology” (which is preferred, because more letters, than the perfectly adequate “method”). Sometime on Saturday night we cut off the comment process to allow for document production and “final review”. And on Monday, we had our fat, plastic-bound comment document ready to be boxed up, hauled off, and handed to the regulators. 

Actually, this particular matter turned out to be a lot more dangerous than “normal”. When we set up the conference room on Day 1, there was a candy dish of M&Ms on a sideboard. So, we nibbled handfuls of M&Ms while we worked. Day 2, the candy dish was empty. But when I went into the little kitchen area and rattled around looking for coffee, I discovered an enormous bag full of M&Ms. And I don’t mean “relatively” enormous. I mean like the size of a 40 pound bag of dog food. Full of M&Ms. At that point, things started to break down physiologically. In place of the candy dish, I found a 4 quart Tupperware bowl in the kitchen. From that moment on, whenever the supply of M&Ms in the conference room started to look low, I would haul the 4 quart bowl into the kitchen and scoop it full of M&Ms from the dog-food sized bag. Which means, of course, that we were eating M&Ms for 15 or 16 hours a day, for 8 days running. That was, in fact, the most disgusting week I’ve ever spent in my life. And remember who you’re dealing with here. I’ve eaten duck tongues In Hangzhou with the hyoid apparatus intact. Spent an afternoon wading waste-deep in a free-running river in Jordan, whose unidirectional flow turned out to be 100% secondary and/or combined sewage effluent. Dug my rodent trap out of the massive pile of shit a black bear took on it over night in the Nantahala Mountains of North Carolina. So I’ve got sterling credentials to judge degrees of “disgusting”. And 8 days of unlimited M&Ms took the prize by a long shot. 

I was so disgusted with myself when I finally made it home from Tulsa (there has to be a bad country song in this somewhere) that I immediately went on the Atkins diet. Which means, of course, that I swapped unlimited bacon, butter, and mayonnaise for the M&Ms. Still, motivation is motivation. 

And why, I hear you asking, did the Tulsa law firm have dog-food sized bags of M&Ms in its kitchen? Well, because one of the Partners successfully defended Hershey’s in some litigation matter. Hershey’s gratitude wasn’t limited to paying whatever massive billings were involved. They sent said Partner dog-food sized bags of M&Ms for life. Which, in my case, given my usual standards of self-discipline, would have put me in the morgue in no time. Where the Medical Examiner would probably have had to stuff me into a drawer, perhaps by slathering my carcass with mayo. 

Which brings us neatly to the nominal subject of this weblog. My health status. In general, I continue to be able to breathe clearly and deeply. Except, of course, when I go outside on a hot, humid, pollen-filled summer day. Then I start to go anoxic within minutes, and must return to the supplemental oxygen in my hospital-style bed in the corner of the living room. Given typical summer conditions here in the mid-Atlantic region, my physical stamina has declined because I can’t really spend enough time outside walking to improve things. We took a drive up to the National Park on the Catoctin Ridge this week while Beth was out here visiting. I made it down the trail about 200 meters, then had to lean on Colin to make it back out of the woods to the car. Cathy, Beth and Colin walked further in on the same trail when it became clear that I had reached my limit. Where they found an intensely agitated family staring at a rotten tree stump. The father was giving a breathless lecture about how deadly the local “Cotton Head Snakes” are. Colin took a peak into the stump, where the sleek, strong body of a black rat snake could be seen. Nobody tried to disabuse the museum-docent wannabe father regarding the differences between rat snakes and copperheads, much less the fictional deadly “Cotton Head Snakes”. 

Anyway. The deal is that my malignancies have been quiescent for another week. I continue to struggle to maintain/gain weight via the milk-like (but milk-free, because in most of the world, everybody older than a couple of years is drastically lactose-intolerant) liquid emergency rations. But even that I seem to be coming to grips with. I’m going to guess that Dr. T’s curiosity is going to get the better of her next time we see her. I think she’s going to send me in for a CT/PET scan, since that last one I had was something like 7 months ago. But I continue to be free of overt symptoms of cancer. And until such symptoms appear, I stay as comfortable as possible. I can now play all 5 of the instrumental pieces I’ve written for guitar, so it’s time to write another one. I get as frustrated over my inability to “sing” as I do at my inability to eat actual food. But then, of course, I consider the alternative. And, difficult as it is, I’m still alive. 

Rock and roll, everyone! A few photos below for your interest. Use ‘em while you got ‘em. You can’t bank ‘em, save ‘em, or hide ‘em. You have to maximize your living now, while you have the opportunity. I’m pullin’ for you. Thanks everybody!!!

It Might Get Messy

Ornette Coleman died. While he dabbled in other instruments, Coleman was, in his heart and in his brain, an absolute giant of the saxophone. Only 2 bands played at Coltrane’s funeral—one was Albert Ayler’s, the other was Coleman’s. Shit, if you take those 3 men, add in Charles Gayle, Eric Dolphy, and Peter Brotzman, you’ve got yourself the foundations for all the abstract expressionist saxophone there’s ever been. And Ayler, Coltrane, and Dolphy were taken from us way too soon. Ayler was found floating in the East River under mysterious, and never sorted out, circumstances. Coltrane had cleaned up his act, going cold turkey in the face of his heroin and alcohol addictions and quit using other drugs (primarily marijuana). He did continue to smoke tobacco. The shining gleam of his brand spanking new (I’ve used the phrase “brand spanking new” for my entire adult life. Looking at it now, written out on the digital “page”, it occurs to me that I have absolutely no smegging idea what it means and what its origins might be) lifestyle proved to be too little too late. Coltrane died in July 1967, 41 years old. His liver, overworked and under appreciated, came apart at the seams. Coltrane died of hepatitis and aggressive liver malignancy. 

Coleman soldiered on, leaving in his wake (that’s gotta be a soupy, sloppy mixed metaphor, no? “Soldiers” implies, at least to me, terrestrial gendarmerie, as in “army” vs. “navy”. And “wake” is an artifact of motion disturbing the surface of a body of water. So my usage of the idiom would seem, at least to me, to indicate dry-land military operating boats on the open ocean, a conceptual non-starter in this context) such fabulous musicians as Roscoe Mitchell, Anthony Braxton, Wayne Shorter, Steve Coleman (no relation), Greg Osby, David Murray, Joshua Redman, et al. His recorded legacy is enormous, includes several well-recorded live dates, and can serve all by itself as a master class in jazz evolution.

So, anyway, for all the obvious reasons, death is on my mind…a lot…these days. In fact, it’s been on my mind since my local general practitioner first peered into my mouth and realized the chronic pain in my mouth and throat was due to cancer. An interesting aspect of having a terminal illness turns out to be the psychological fluctuations that accompany and magnify the good and the bad of the physical condition I find myself in at any particular moment.

For example. On a recent weekend day a few weeks ago the house was completely empty (except, of course, for me and the dog) as everybody else had places to and people to meet. So here I was, with my solid-body Yamaha Pacifica and an industrial strength amplifier with an 8 inch speaker. Music technology has reached an awesome pinnacle, where “small and convenient” amplifiers can pump out serious volume and very high-quality sound production. So, for a couple hours I treated the neighbors to my technically marginal but technologically marvelous guitar improvisations. 

Then things went suddenly south. Remember that when the doctors administered the second round of radiation and surgery, the plastic surgeon had to improvise a way to replace my dysfunctional epiglottis. You may recall the photo posted here of the poor little valve’s misshapen condition. It looked distinctly like a squashed and wrinkled piece of dried fruit, perhaps an apricot that was dehydrated without the sulfur treatment that preserves color. Anyway, the best he could come up with was to borrow a chunk of muscle from my chest and insert it between my GIT and my airway. Given that my lungs are full of malignancies, keeping them free of aspirated gut acid seemed like a good idea. 

And, of course, while the rest of the family was engaged in various errands, I managed to aspirate a big slurp of gut acid. So here I am, alone in the house, unable to breathe, unable to speak, so thinking I had to make it a neighbor’s place to get somebody to call 911. But of course, since I’m not breathing, I can’t really get across the 40 or 50 feet to the nearest neighbor’s place (Cathy later berated me—she long ago arranged with the 911 people to send an ambulance if my home number calls and nobody talks). So I suppressed my panic, sat down, calmed down, worked to get my breathing back to at least a survivable minimum. And just as I’m finally recovering after sitting zazen for half an hour, Lucy the dog runs downstairs and demands to go out (she ordinarily is loathe to let me take her out, so she was probably rather desperate). All I could do was look at her sympathetically until she went back upstairs. 

The meditation eventually worked. I could breathe, and avoided a nasty ride in an ambulance followed by getting slapped around in the emergency room for hours and hours while waiting for a room to open up. Over time, such acute failures of my improvised thoracic infrastructure have become blessedly rare. Of course, I still struggle to pump in sufficient U.N. emergency ration liquid “food”. Otherwise, I’m able to breathe surprisingly normally. Oh, and I now have a couple of guitars and an amp, along with the fantastic effects box Tim was kind enough to lend me right here in my sick bed corner of the living room.

Anyway. In general, I continue to be surprisingly well and functional these days. Yesterday, in fact, we hosted a low-key get-together of old friends. The grilled pork shoulder was delicious (of course I’m forced to go with second-hand reports regarding food quality). We sat on the patio in the comfortably (if a little overly-so) warm afternoon and laughed the day away. I’m now physically exhausted but psychologically pumped. I thank everybody for the wonderful party. Such events make me feel like a normal, functional human being. For a few hours I forget that I’m dying. I feel the life and the strength of the friendship and the humor. The outcome is far more therapeutic than any of the vast array of medications I am forced to take. 

My thanks to everyone who reads this weblog, and to those who think of me once in a while, and especially to the wonderful crew who schlepped their way here to spend their Saturday afternoon. Some experimental flower photos follow below. Thanks again, everyone. I’m still alive, and I’m still strong, because of your love and friendship!

It Might Get Messy

This week, the world seems to have achieved a particularly wacky moment in history. I don’t know if anybody out there has fired up their Official Men In Black Weird-Shit-O-Meter, but this would be a good time to do it. Consider the internet news sources crème de la crop…or is that “crème”…or “crap”…. . Anyway. Consider things, including: 1) Bruce Jenner transformed into Caitlyn Jenner, got a hot magazine cover, and has her children call her “Dad”, 2) Larry Hogan, business guy and hardcore republican governor of Maryland, returned from a state-funded boondoggle in Japan raving about a multibillion dollar maglev commuter train between Baltimore and Washington, 3) the Muslim world, not screwed up enough by 15 centuries of overlay on landscapes defined by tribal ancestry and a century or so of maps fingerpainted by British and French diners deep into their after-dinner brandy finds the befuddled west (that would be Befuddled West, as in us and our European compatriots) managing to forge a powerful military union between otherwise diametrically opposed DAESH/ISIS/ISIL and Al Qaeda, particularly Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula, 4) republicans, dozens of ‘em, smell Hillary Clinton’s blood in the water and are circling like crazed, but not overly intelligent, sharks on a grey whale carcass…and the list goes on. We could play this game for hours. Instead, let’s consider the important stuff.

Like the fact that the U.S., nation renowned worldwide for systemic disinterest in soccer, put together what appears to be a generally-accepted-as-credible corruption case against the Federation of International Football Associations (FIFA). Note that FIFA does not limit its interest to soccer. It also governs organized “futsal” (an indoor game played on a small pitch with a dead ball) and “beach soccer” (which I can only presume is played under a dress code similar to that governing “beach volleyball”). 

Actually, it seemed at first that most of the world, raking in millions and millions of dollars from international football activities, were content to let FIFA walk. The backbreaker came when the tiny, incredibly wealthy nation of Qatar, a desert outpost of raw petroleum and high-end retailing, was awarded quintessential summertime fun of the quadrennial…(is that right? It happens every 4 years, not 4 times a year)…World Cup of Soccer. Summer temperatures in Qatar generally peg well north of 100 degrees Fahrenheit. And they don’t fluctuate much. If it’s summer and you’re in Qatar, it’s really, really hot. A completely insane place to play summertime football unless you a) get paid big bucks but b) don’t actually PLAY soccer at all. This would describe the white men in ties who run FIFA. 

So the U.S. Department of Justice busted FIFA for obvious corruption, which can be summed up simply as “pay (lots and lots of pay) to play”. The bidding process for award of the next couple of World Cups was characterized by under-the-table enrichment of individual FIFA executives in exchange for the Cup. I must admit I have not dug deep enough to determine whether FIFA rules and regulations actually outlaw such payments. But I’m guessing they don’t specifically address such things at all. If I were, say, FIFA President Sepp Blatter, I would first, before anything else, change my name to something that doesn’t sound so much like a rare and deadly parasitic worm. Then I would simply announce that the FIFA Cup process is driven by who gives more money and other valuable items (jewelry, destination travel, works of art, anything likely to bring bidding minima in the range of 6 figures and farther (further??) north on eBay) to FIFA leadership. I’d issue a simple, baldfaced press release explaining that a basic assumption of the World Cup bidding process is that countries willing to spend big bucks obtaining the Cup games are likely to spend bigger bucks making Cup activities just delightful for spectators, athletes, and team officials. This would ease the job of everyone involved in prosecution and defense in the World Court, or United Nations, or Switzerland, or wherever things like this go to trial. Think about it. Prosecutor’s got a list as long as a Gutenberg Bible of checks, cash, and jewelry collected by FIFA executives from Qatar federal government. Chief Prosecutor runs her hand through her hair to emphasize to the judge (or jury) her frustration, and then starts on the list: “did you not, Mr. Blatter…haven’t you changed your name yet?...umm, where was I…oh yeah. Did you not, Mr. Blatter, accept Cashier’s Check number 9917540 in the amount of 1.37 million dollars U.S., drawn on the Royal Bank of Qatar, on 3 April 2014 at a meeting in the bar of the Hotel d’Angleterre in Geneva, Switzerland?” And Sepp Blatter (his legal name change, to “Captain America”, is hung up in European Union bureaucracy in Brussels) says “Uhh…yeah.” Prosecutor runs down her list of thousands of checks and piles of cash, and each time whatever FIFA executive is on the stand simply acknowledges “yes”. By the end of the trial, the Chief Prosecutor has replaced her studious, no-nonsense, rigorously focused persona with that of a tank-topped, tramp-stamped, beer-swigging, weekend user of injectable narcotics who has left her husband and two young children to work as a caricature artist on the waterfront in Marseilles. 

Anyway. From the perspective of me and my cancers, it’s been another really good week. In fact, and completely unexpectedly, my health is clearly improving, rather than deteriorating, over time. Much as this delights me and Oncologist Dr. T, it is confusing the hell out of her. As she points out repeatedly, I remain riddled with malignancies throughout my respiratory system and in thoracic components of my body cavity. It is possible (although we have NOT collected data to verify) that my diaphragm is itself populated by cancerous loci. Regardless of the precise distribution of malignancies, in general I am stricken with cancers that, by virtue of their locations, “should” be rapidly claiming my remaining life. 

But, for whatever reason(s), my cancers are on vacation, and have been since my last chemotherapy infusion 7 months ago. I am continuously grateful to whatever god, gods, God, or naturally random processes have gifted me with this unexpected slice of life. If you remember back to when I was a total physical wreck (those of you who made the wonderful, life-affirming, unselfish journey to see me over Thanksgiving know what I mean by “wreck”), the docs provided me with an estimate of the value I might expect to wring from the devastation of the chemotherapy—3 or 4 relatively comfortable months. That was the payoff that Cathy, the kids, and I used to judge the benefits vs. costs of continuing to take the incredible pounding administered by the chemo. And here I sit in the real world, having bought not only at least twice the time the docs thought likely, but also the partial recession of such ugly symptoms as chronic pain, mucous-impaired breathing via tracheostomy, ongoing bleeding, panic attacks, depression, and intractable vomiting. 

So here I am, perched in my bed in a corner of the living room, reading, writing, working on guitar skills, taking photographs whenever I get outside to shuffle slowly around the house or down the path to the woods and the creek. I do find myself irrationally annoyed that the cancers claimed my abilities to eat, drink, and speak, 3 things of enormous importance to me. But I kick myself out of such blatant self-pity by thinking of people whose illnesses were so much more difficult, so much more devastating, than mine. People like Beau Biden, with a young family, living by his intellect and dying of brain cancer. Musicians like Charles Mingus and Jason Becker, living by their fingers on bass and guitars, dying of amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (“Lou Gehrig’s disease”), robbed of their primary physical abilities and the art they loved. And zillions more, so many and so much worse off than I am.

Then, just to make sure I’m REALLY paying attention, there’s this story [http://tribune.com.pk/story/898882/three-killed-in-sargodha-gas-cylinder-blast/]. Two guys on a street in Pakistan, both wearing massive suicide vests. They get into an argument. Argument escalates to shouting. And then, when they’re really pissed off at each other, they both detonate their vests. 

Sounds like the ultimate trump (is that redundant?) in a formal, competitive debate. I wonder how many points you get per gram of C4?

Live ‘em while you got ‘em everybody. They’re precious and they’re perishable. Jason Becker knows it. I know it. And now you know it. And you’ve got time to do something about it. Let’s Rock and Roll!!!

It Might Get Messy

Roland the Headless Thompson Gunner “blew Van Owen’s body…from there to Johannesburg”. “There”, in this particular case, is former trade port turned tourist gateway Mombasa. The city surrounds a muddy estuary on the coast of Kenya and is a point-of-entry for tourists heading out to game parks, including Serengeti, Ngorongoro, and Tsavo. I’ve never been there. But Wikitravel (http://wikitravel.org/en/Mombasa) and other sources highlight health and safety issues without offering much in the way of attractions to offset such risks. Lonely Planet points out that its Swahili name means “Island of War”, and provides four tourist “attraction”—an old fort turned art gallery, a spice market, a mosque, and a 1902 courthouse also turned art gallery. The British Government advises against visiting, and suggests that if you are presently there, you should get your butt out. It may be that Nairobi and Kampala are effective competitors for the tourist pass-through business. Without the sticky silt, salt marsh mosquitos, and long history of piracy and street crime. If you will indulge my drawing conclusions without having actually visited (breaking my own inviolate…uh, or not… rule for technically credible scientific testimony (that is, under oath in environmental legal matters)), it sounds like a good place to keep off your itinerary. 

But these are not the droids we’re looking for. My teenage years, in keeping with common practice at the time, encompassed numerous incidents with potential to leave me injured, sick, or dead. This “long list” includes the usual, ranging from driving while drinking to swimming in water heavily polluted by raw sewage. I can recall a few incidents, maybe half a dozen, where death was a lot closer than “usual”. Moments when the cold statistical odds of survival were well below 50%. For example:

• Wayne Hills High School faculty, including my father, used to take a group of students camping on a spring weekend to Lake George, New York. I usually went along, but with crippling shyness and my own interests (mostly involving reptiles, amphibians, birds, and fish) not shared by the older group from the Hills, I spent a lot of time stalking salamanders and snakes off in the wilderness. Once I crawled under a big hemlock to sort through the layer of needles on the ground beneath, only to receive a really nasty knock on my head. I’m pretty sure I was briefly unconscious. When I came around and found my attacker, it turned out to be a large, outdated and mostly rotted campsite sign from years past. With a six-inch long, rusty, sharp-pointed spike sticking through it on one side. If that spike had hit my skull rather than the spongy wood, I’m guessing it would have taken the rangers a couple of days to find my carcass.
• My fishing, hunting, and herping buddy, we’ll call him “Archer I” because he runs an archery business in Tennessee, and I were bored one summer day. We set up a “primitive weapons war” in a woodlot near Pompton Lake. After half an hour to construct weapons, we stalked each other, looking for the first shot. I used my pocket knife to fashion a sleek javelin. “I” and I (has a nice Rastafarian ring to it, doesn’t it?) spotted each other at the same moment. I chucked my javelin into the tree he was perched in, missing by several feet. He drew the short bow he’d made with a length of found twine and shot a beautifully crafted arrow he’d tipped with a sharp bit of quartz crystal and fletched with stiff leaves. The arrow struck the front of my cheek, ripped right on through, tearing a couple of inches of flesh on its way into my mouth. As it was, it took some fast talking to assure my parents all the blood was due to a simple accident. If that arrow had hit my eye, it would have entered my brain and dropped me in place.
• Same buddy—he was my outdoorsy friend—and I got somebody to drop us off with a jon boat on the Passaic River at the New York/New Jersey state line. We took a couple of leisurely days floating down to Pompton Lake, spending the night on an upriver island deep enough in the woods that our campfire wasn’t obvious. Along one fairly shallow stretch of river, I was reaching down from the bow of the boat grabbing freshwater mussels to add to my oddball collection of biological bits. There was an enormous mussel just about out of my reach, but I leaned way forward, and…bent at the waste as the boat ran over my head and torso, trapping me there, legs in the boat, head being scraped by the boat hull on one side and riverbottom rocks on the other. Even though it was quite clear to me that I was in a dangerous, potentially deadly, situation, I must admit I was cracking up laughing at the slapstick nature of things. Archer “I” managed to get the boat turned sideways to the current so I could extract my scraped-bloody head from the river. If things had gone the other way—say I slipped whole-body under the bow as the boat whipped over me and headed downstream—I might well have been unconscious and underwater, with “I” unable to rescue me until he managed to beach the boat somewhere downstream, hike back up to where I would have been drifting like Aragorn after the battle with the Warg Riders in Rohan, and, I have little doubt, dead.

That’s sufficient examples to make my case. The other 3 or 4…or maybe 5 or 6…near-death experiences were vaguely similar. Skating alone late at night on thin springtime ice, passing out and whacking my head on sharp rocks…the usual. 

Anyway. Why, I have no doubt you are asking, am I dragging you through these adolescent reminiscences? The answer, I’m afraid, has a lot to do with simple self-indulgence. It’s now been 7 months since my last chemotherapy infusion. My lungs and chest cavity are chock-full of temporarily inactive malignant lesions. Death has been on my mind, as I contemplate the end of this physiological armistice and the re-start of the medical war. 

Oncologist Dr. T is confident that she has sufficient weapons at her disposal for us to fight a third credible battle with the cancers now scattered around my insides. Dr. H, surgeon, says “we can cut out anything that needs cutting.” I’m guessing the upcoming struggle won’t involve much surgery. If the CT scans are representative, there are no real points-of-focus for this battlefield. Rather, diffuse “lesions” are scattered, and their transition to malignancy will also be diffuse. Can’t “surgically remove” both lungs, much less the lining of the chest cavity. 

Dr. N, radiologist, would be, I suspect, willing to take another crack at administering radiation therapy, should there be some way it might be useful. As he quietly told me after the second round of radiation, he gave me “way higher doses than other doctors would, just because…well, I thought I could.” Gotta admire somebody willing to do what needs to be done. I haven’t inquired directly, but I’m guessing I’m already approaching, if not already beyond, my “recommended” lifetime dose of radiation exposure. That’s the other great thing about Dr. N. In fact, the whole medical team. They are are focused, intensely so, on their patients. If I tell them I want to keep fighting, they’ll find some way to get me back on my feet, back into my armor, fitted with weapons, and back onto the battlefield. They are even willing, as they showed during my last round of treatment, to talk me into coming out of my corner one more time if they think I’m giving up too soon. I think that willingness, having the guts to take a desperately ill, weak, and unhappy patient who is ready to forego further treatment, give up food and water and die, and convince him that the war is still worth fighting, is the most impressive characteristic of this medical team. 

Neither the docs nor I know when my life is going to be back in their hands. But every passing day shifts the probability function an increment closer to that time. Roland the Headless Thompson Gunner had it right. Throughout human history, mercenary soldiers were paid for what they loved to do—make war. Throughout MY history, I’ve loved to do a handful of different things—“ecologizing”, reading, writing, painting, cutting paper, making music, cooking, archery, traveling, teaching, et al. All these passions add up to a grand sum of BEING ALIVE. 

But I have one up on Roland. In my case, the thing I’m fighting for—life—is its own reward. Not to mention being a sine qua non for production of marginal-quality paintings, photographs, pieces of music, etc. Which explains why I live ‘em while I got ‘em. I’ve been close enough to death (over the past 4 years that is, let’s just discount my teenage time if it’s ok with you) to know how easy it is to slip over the event horizon that will take me away from the family, friends, and activities I love so dearly. 

And you all are a HUGE component of the arsenal that lets me fight this war. Thank you so much, everybody. I love you all!!!