Things in my world have been pretty boring for the second week in a row. Given the ups and downs of the past year—spending nearly alternate weeks desperately ill in the hospital, first from the second round of radiation, then from 6 nasty cycles of additional chemotherapy—“boring” is a good thing.
Being relatively healthy (which is what “boring” means these days) has given me a chance to catch up on some research—stuff we’ve talked about over the past couple of years.
For one thing, anthropologists solved a mystery that’s been bugging them for a long time. Based on DNA analyses, we know that Paleolithic modern humans (Homo sapiens, Cro Magnon people) interbred with Neanderthal people (Homo neanderthalensis). But. Nobody had been able to locate simultaneous populations of the two species. In other words, scientists couldn’t find where the shacking up went on. Recently, in a newly discovered cave in northern Israel near the Sea of Galilee, a partial skull of a modern human was recovered, and dated to 55,000 years before present, putting it smack dab on the correct moment in time [1]. But the big bonus was that the new cave system shared the neighborhood with two caves that were full of Neanderthal people at the same time. Voila! Our ancestors had their illicit trysts with their neighboring Neanderthals in the then-forested, now-desert, landscape of the Levant. After a relatively short period of time, interbreeding among the two species stopped. Modern humans then spread over the Mediterranean basin and Europe, displacing (one way or another—via competition at best or warfare and possibly dining at worst) Neanderthals to fringe habitats. Homo sapiens didn’t stop their spread at the Eurasian border that was the furthest reach of Neanderthals, but continued on to circumnavigate the globe, reaching the islands of Pacific Oceania most recently, just a few thousand years ago.
The other interesting report is a summary of prehistoric and early historic cancers in human bodies [2]. It turns out that there are sufficient skeletons with primary (skeletal) or secondary (metastasized-to-skeletal) cancers to develop a “baseline” rate of human cancers (unfortunately, the baseline incorporates tumors in individuals dated to the industrial revolution, meaning it’s a rather modern baseline, affected by the unhealthy living and working conditions in late 19th century Britain). The “baseline” rate for cancers in collections of old human bones is about 2% for males and 4% to 7% for females. The male rate is dominated by metastasized prostate cancer, females by gynecological cancers. Rather soon after the data providing these rates, male cancer rates rose drastically due to differential tobacco use [2]. The author of the summary report cited here concludes that the 2% to 7% rate is likely reasonable for prehistoric as well as modern times. Now, the lifetime risk of contracting fatal cancer in the U.S. is presently around 33%. Leaving an enormous delta that medical sciences struggle to explain and explore for life-saving therapies.
Anyway, back to my own “modern” cancers. I saw my oncologist for a brief appointment this week. Basically, it was a happy visit. Not only have my symptoms not increased, they’ve actually gotten a bit better. My pain level is way down. If it continues so, I’ll start to wean myself off the opiates I take every few hours throughout the day (although, as the doctor points out, the Dilaudid I take is sufficiently strong to help with breathing problems when they occur independent of pain). Now I need to work on regaining strength and weight. And watch for signs of resurgent cancers that could pop up almost anywhere in my body, since there are likely residual malignancies in my lungs, throat, chest, sinuses, liver, and, most ominously, what’s left (after surgical removal of much of it) of my lymphatic system.
All things considered, it could be a LOT worse at this point. In fact, a year ago the doctors were giving me very little chance to be alive for this year’s holidays. The medical crew at Greater Baltimore Medical Center, and particularly the throat cancer specialists, didn’t give themselves enough credit. They are really good at what they do. And they don’t give up. Several times in the past few years I was more than ready to give up. The doctors and nurses and social workers weren’t ready to let me do so. They went about their business quietly and expertly, and I lived through the brutality of both the massive and recurrent tumors and the incredibly intrusive treatments. And I’m still here to watch my kids grow up, read, practice guitar, write, sketch, cut paper, photograph, and think.
And to think about and thank all of you. Remember the mantra—live ‘em while you got ‘em, because they are NOT forever. And haven’t been for as long as there have been human beings on this planet. But modern practitioners backed up by up-to-date technology can do a lot to give you more of ‘em. So, along with thanking you all for being here for me, I thank again my medical support at GBMC. I couldn’t do it without any of you!
PS—I really appreciate the visit today from New Jersey and Maryland folks. Thank you so much for investing your weekend day in my favor! Beyond the call of duty, and made me feel very grateful and physically much better. Thanks again!
[1] http://www.nature.com/news/neanderthals-gain-human-neighbour-1.16802
[2] http://discovermagazine.com/2013/julyaug/16-history-cancer-afflicted-people-since-prehistoric-times-fossils-show
Saturday, January 31, 2015
Saturday, January 24, 2015
It Might Get Messy
Is it just me, or do things seem to be spiraling into anarchic wackiness? Apart from the lethal and potentially lethal components of being, at the very least things are certainly entertaining. Making me doubly glad that I’m still around to read Google news compilations and watch TV updates. When my cancers revived after the first round of treatments, I was pretty much scheduled to be toast by now. It is a tribute to the health care teams at Greater Baltimore Medical Center that I’m still here to be astounded by the “swirling mass of grays and black and whites” (Rolling Stones, Salt of the Earth) that our world finds itself in. Indeed, Mick and Kief got it just right when they continued “it don’t look real to me…in fact it looks so strange”... .
Let’s run down some of the global greatest hits from the recent past:
• The New England Patriots, it turns out, doctor their footballs, yielding statistical performance that is big-time outside any possibility of chance in a distribution defined by the rest of the league (http://www.slate.com/articles/sports/sports_nut/2015/01/ballghazi_the_new_england_patriots_lose_an_insanely_low_number_of_fumbles.html). At one point, somebody on HuffPost yesterday reported that Tom Brady was asked “if he liked to have his balls rubbed before playing with them”. I must admit I’ve avoided watching the full video of Brady’s press briefing in case it’s not true.
• A bunch of cartoonists for a failing French weekly tabloid were hunted down and killed by a sleeper cell of Islamist extremists who believed they were speaking (and acting) for God (don’t these people ever ask themselves why the all-powerful gods they posit as the foundation of their religion would need to have his/her/its being protected by fundamentalist whack jobs dragooned off the streets of impoverished Paris suburbs? This issue is far from restricted to the Muslim world, the same question should be asked by megachurch protestant preachers across the American heartland, and their believers in the impoverished rural villages across the corn belt).
• An incredibly dangerous virus breaks out in the remote west African countryside, arising from the quasi-ceremonial consumption of “bush meat”, which consists of everything from pythons to tree squirrels to chimpanzees and gorillas. Pretty much by luck and the generous application of laundry bleach, the outbreak is halted before reaching the larger world. The actual major diseases of African hinterlands—malaria, sleeping sickness, Leishmaniasis, schistosomiasis—continue to hold disproportionate sway over local people, eliciting the same marginal response from the rest of the world that they have for years.
• With 2 years to go until the presidential election, the field of potential candidates looks like a bad black-and-white 1960s television comedy rerun, perhaps something from the Lucy Show or maybe The Honymooners.
• The United States government is paralyzed by a congress that looks like a bad black-and-white etc.
• Western Asia, at the southern border of the Soviet U…uh, I mean, Russia…is coming apart at the seams, closely akin to the long Cold War that dominated global discourse for decades. With this difference. Nikita Kruschev and JFK were willing to act as responsible adults and pull the world back from the brink of thermonuclear devastation (pretty much by agreeing that the Castro brothers in Cuba were nuts, and that their own trusted advisors couldn’t be trusted). In today’s world, massive nuclear arsenals are also in the hands of the Ukraine, Pakistan, India, and Israel. None of whom strike me as patient, deliberative, cautious, and responsible entities when a crisis is careening down the highway in their direction
• The Middle East is a crisis careening down the highway, with failed states ranging from the southern tip of the Arabian Peninsula to the European borders and beyond. Which condition leaves lots and lots of room for fundamentalist whack jobs to operate in.
• Rhinoceros and elephants continue to be hunted to the brink of extinction in the weird belief among Asian men that consumption of ivory (which is basically keratin, that is, a tough, stringy protein like fingernails) provides aphrodisiac activity. My optimistic belief that the wide availability of pharmaceutical products like Cialis and its competitors would take the pressure off pachyderms has proven to be completely wrong. Similar concerns attend to populations of tigers (whose bones are used in folk medicine), except that habitat loss probably dominates tiger issues. BTW, you would think these contretemps would give pause to the legions of ethnobotanists who, to a person, believe in the talking point that” “native peoples” have extensive natural pharmacies at their fingertips”. But no, unfortunately. Ethnobotanists believe, also to a person, that if only we followed more and more remote Amazonian tribal priests into the most remote corners of the rain forest, we could put scourges like cancer, diabetes, heart disease, et al. to bed, not to mention malaria, sleeping sickness, Leishmaniasis, and schistosomiasis.
Well, we could play this game for as many pages as I could type and far more than you would want to read. My point is simple (and yes, I’m aware that this was far from the most direct way to get to the point!). My illness and the technical, financial, social, and personal complexities of treatment have made me incredibly grateful that I live in the clean, wealthy, western world (actually, having traveled some in dark corners of the developing world, I should say I’ve been REMINDED to be grateful). And I am also thankful that I’ve been able, in admittedly and unfortunately small ways only, to contribute to environmental quality in general and specifically in some particularly unfortunate places. I entreat you to spend some time thinking about your own circumstances, and how lucky we are to live where and how we do. And in addition, of course, make sure you live ‘em while you got ‘em. Because the unfortunate reality is that they are NOT forever.
Thanks for being here, everybody. I’m not doing too badly these days. Basically this means that the residual cancers salted throughout my body from liver to lungs and beyond, have yet to make themselves known symptomatically. And the longer this condition pertains, the better I like it!
Finally, and I know many of you have seen these already, I attach below a few photos of additional bird species photographed at our feeders. To get much more biodiversity documented in the winter avifauna here, I’m gonna need some serious winter weather to push some of the more unusual species south. Rest assured that I’m on the case, with my Canon Powershot SX50HS with the 50X optical zoom, at the ready!
Let’s run down some of the global greatest hits from the recent past:
• The New England Patriots, it turns out, doctor their footballs, yielding statistical performance that is big-time outside any possibility of chance in a distribution defined by the rest of the league (http://www.slate.com/articles/sports/sports_nut/2015/01/ballghazi_the_new_england_patriots_lose_an_insanely_low_number_of_fumbles.html). At one point, somebody on HuffPost yesterday reported that Tom Brady was asked “if he liked to have his balls rubbed before playing with them”. I must admit I’ve avoided watching the full video of Brady’s press briefing in case it’s not true.
• A bunch of cartoonists for a failing French weekly tabloid were hunted down and killed by a sleeper cell of Islamist extremists who believed they were speaking (and acting) for God (don’t these people ever ask themselves why the all-powerful gods they posit as the foundation of their religion would need to have his/her/its being protected by fundamentalist whack jobs dragooned off the streets of impoverished Paris suburbs? This issue is far from restricted to the Muslim world, the same question should be asked by megachurch protestant preachers across the American heartland, and their believers in the impoverished rural villages across the corn belt).
• An incredibly dangerous virus breaks out in the remote west African countryside, arising from the quasi-ceremonial consumption of “bush meat”, which consists of everything from pythons to tree squirrels to chimpanzees and gorillas. Pretty much by luck and the generous application of laundry bleach, the outbreak is halted before reaching the larger world. The actual major diseases of African hinterlands—malaria, sleeping sickness, Leishmaniasis, schistosomiasis—continue to hold disproportionate sway over local people, eliciting the same marginal response from the rest of the world that they have for years.
• With 2 years to go until the presidential election, the field of potential candidates looks like a bad black-and-white 1960s television comedy rerun, perhaps something from the Lucy Show or maybe The Honymooners.
• The United States government is paralyzed by a congress that looks like a bad black-and-white etc.
• Western Asia, at the southern border of the Soviet U…uh, I mean, Russia…is coming apart at the seams, closely akin to the long Cold War that dominated global discourse for decades. With this difference. Nikita Kruschev and JFK were willing to act as responsible adults and pull the world back from the brink of thermonuclear devastation (pretty much by agreeing that the Castro brothers in Cuba were nuts, and that their own trusted advisors couldn’t be trusted). In today’s world, massive nuclear arsenals are also in the hands of the Ukraine, Pakistan, India, and Israel. None of whom strike me as patient, deliberative, cautious, and responsible entities when a crisis is careening down the highway in their direction
• The Middle East is a crisis careening down the highway, with failed states ranging from the southern tip of the Arabian Peninsula to the European borders and beyond. Which condition leaves lots and lots of room for fundamentalist whack jobs to operate in.
• Rhinoceros and elephants continue to be hunted to the brink of extinction in the weird belief among Asian men that consumption of ivory (which is basically keratin, that is, a tough, stringy protein like fingernails) provides aphrodisiac activity. My optimistic belief that the wide availability of pharmaceutical products like Cialis and its competitors would take the pressure off pachyderms has proven to be completely wrong. Similar concerns attend to populations of tigers (whose bones are used in folk medicine), except that habitat loss probably dominates tiger issues. BTW, you would think these contretemps would give pause to the legions of ethnobotanists who, to a person, believe in the talking point that” “native peoples” have extensive natural pharmacies at their fingertips”. But no, unfortunately. Ethnobotanists believe, also to a person, that if only we followed more and more remote Amazonian tribal priests into the most remote corners of the rain forest, we could put scourges like cancer, diabetes, heart disease, et al. to bed, not to mention malaria, sleeping sickness, Leishmaniasis, and schistosomiasis.
Well, we could play this game for as many pages as I could type and far more than you would want to read. My point is simple (and yes, I’m aware that this was far from the most direct way to get to the point!). My illness and the technical, financial, social, and personal complexities of treatment have made me incredibly grateful that I live in the clean, wealthy, western world (actually, having traveled some in dark corners of the developing world, I should say I’ve been REMINDED to be grateful). And I am also thankful that I’ve been able, in admittedly and unfortunately small ways only, to contribute to environmental quality in general and specifically in some particularly unfortunate places. I entreat you to spend some time thinking about your own circumstances, and how lucky we are to live where and how we do. And in addition, of course, make sure you live ‘em while you got ‘em. Because the unfortunate reality is that they are NOT forever.
Thanks for being here, everybody. I’m not doing too badly these days. Basically this means that the residual cancers salted throughout my body from liver to lungs and beyond, have yet to make themselves known symptomatically. And the longer this condition pertains, the better I like it!
Finally, and I know many of you have seen these already, I attach below a few photos of additional bird species photographed at our feeders. To get much more biodiversity documented in the winter avifauna here, I’m gonna need some serious winter weather to push some of the more unusual species south. Rest assured that I’m on the case, with my Canon Powershot SX50HS with the 50X optical zoom, at the ready!
Saturday, January 17, 2015
It Might Get Messy
When I was in high school, Pompton Lake froze over every winter and was universally appreciated for its excellent ice skating. We devoted weekends and other days off to pickup hockey. When the ice was hard and smooth and there was no snow cover, we had to run down errant pucks for hundreds of meters following missed shots or passes. The best times were when there was cold snow on top of good ice. Then we could shovel out a rink, haul our goals made from salvaged lumber and chicken wire out onto the lake, and spend long days on the ice.
I loved tending goal, and since there was only one other goalie-by-preference in town, got to play as much, if not more, than I wanted to. My family couldn’t afford a set of full-size goalie gear, but one Christmas my folks pasted enough money together to get me a cut-down set of leg blockers. I used an old first-baseman’s glove (with a sponge in the palm) in my catching hand, and a regular hockey glove on my stick hand. This outfit worked fine for run-of-the-mill mixed-skill outdoor games. It was pretty painful in action for the few nights a year that we played against actual trained teams on indoor rinks.
The PLHS chemistry teacher at the time, Mrs. C, loved hockey herself and came and played whenever we were on the lake. Periodically we would put together a students-vs-faculty game. These were more formal, higher-profile events than our usual slapdash efforts. There were often spectators, and we played timed periods (the latter at the insistence of the faculty, remember these were the days when nearly every adult, and probably 1/3 of the students, smoked). Since none of the faculty were prepared to play goalie, I was invariably farmed out to the teacher’s side while Big Jeff handled keeper’s chores for the students.
I recall one faculty/student game in particular. The ice was perfect, and we had cleared a full-size rink in the foot or more of snow, and the snow bank boundaries had frozen solid so the puck would actually rebound off the wall rather than bury itself. For some reason we ended up using somebody’s promotional novelty puck, with a maple leaf embossed in one side. It was a hellishly cold day and, per usual, I played for the faculty side. It was getting late in the afternoon, and we’d been out on the ice for many hours. The skin under my jeans was close to, if not actually, frost bitten. We were playing out the last few minutes of the final period, and the setting sun was directly in my eyes. When Ken L. unleashed a nasty slap shot from about what would be the face off spot to the right of the goal, I lost it in the sun. I found it when it whacked full-on inside my left thigh, hammering the smooth surface of my groin through the frozen denim. I managed to slip the puck underneath my body as I went down, at least saving the goal. Took me quite a while to get up, though. It hurt like hell. I’m pretty sure by the time I was functional we decided to call it a game. I think the students beat the faculty 5-3. Despite losing, I had a lot of saves.
When I got home, I slipped under my electric blanket set on “deep fat fry” and tried to warm up. When I pulled on some clothes to head downstairs for dinner, I noticed the perfect outline of a maple leaf, set in a bright red circle, on my left groin muscle. It took more than a week for that bruise to disappear. I got to show it off proudly to the fencing team when we suited up for practice and the week’s meet.
I recalled that incident earlier this week as I contemplated the state of my health at the moment. For the first time in a long time—years, in fact—I don’t have anything that feels like it’s threateningly increasing in level of pain or discomfort. I’m incredibly weak—the “exercise” involved in walking around the house a bit and going up and down a flight of stairs leaves me winded and with leg muscles threatening to cramp. And I still have the pain in my throat and upper chest, although even that might be getting a little better. And my present level of comfort is, unfortunately, illusory. The chemotherapy course I went through in the autumn could knock the malignancies back, but could not “cure” them. So over time, residual cancers in my chest, lungs, and/or lymph system are recovering, growing, building toward the time when they become symptomatic and put me back on the path to discomfort and death.
But for the moment, I’m fine with the painful stuff receding, following the model of the maple leaf tattoo. I’ll feel as comfortable as I can for as long as I can. Then I’ll go back to war with the cancer, having had this nice break to rest up and recoup.
And I’ll keep you plugged in to how things progress. Remember this, because it’s important: live ‘em while you got ‘em, because they are NOT forever. But if you’re lucky, you might get to stretch ‘em out, kind of like I’m doing now!
I loved tending goal, and since there was only one other goalie-by-preference in town, got to play as much, if not more, than I wanted to. My family couldn’t afford a set of full-size goalie gear, but one Christmas my folks pasted enough money together to get me a cut-down set of leg blockers. I used an old first-baseman’s glove (with a sponge in the palm) in my catching hand, and a regular hockey glove on my stick hand. This outfit worked fine for run-of-the-mill mixed-skill outdoor games. It was pretty painful in action for the few nights a year that we played against actual trained teams on indoor rinks.
The PLHS chemistry teacher at the time, Mrs. C, loved hockey herself and came and played whenever we were on the lake. Periodically we would put together a students-vs-faculty game. These were more formal, higher-profile events than our usual slapdash efforts. There were often spectators, and we played timed periods (the latter at the insistence of the faculty, remember these were the days when nearly every adult, and probably 1/3 of the students, smoked). Since none of the faculty were prepared to play goalie, I was invariably farmed out to the teacher’s side while Big Jeff handled keeper’s chores for the students.
I recall one faculty/student game in particular. The ice was perfect, and we had cleared a full-size rink in the foot or more of snow, and the snow bank boundaries had frozen solid so the puck would actually rebound off the wall rather than bury itself. For some reason we ended up using somebody’s promotional novelty puck, with a maple leaf embossed in one side. It was a hellishly cold day and, per usual, I played for the faculty side. It was getting late in the afternoon, and we’d been out on the ice for many hours. The skin under my jeans was close to, if not actually, frost bitten. We were playing out the last few minutes of the final period, and the setting sun was directly in my eyes. When Ken L. unleashed a nasty slap shot from about what would be the face off spot to the right of the goal, I lost it in the sun. I found it when it whacked full-on inside my left thigh, hammering the smooth surface of my groin through the frozen denim. I managed to slip the puck underneath my body as I went down, at least saving the goal. Took me quite a while to get up, though. It hurt like hell. I’m pretty sure by the time I was functional we decided to call it a game. I think the students beat the faculty 5-3. Despite losing, I had a lot of saves.
When I got home, I slipped under my electric blanket set on “deep fat fry” and tried to warm up. When I pulled on some clothes to head downstairs for dinner, I noticed the perfect outline of a maple leaf, set in a bright red circle, on my left groin muscle. It took more than a week for that bruise to disappear. I got to show it off proudly to the fencing team when we suited up for practice and the week’s meet.
I recalled that incident earlier this week as I contemplated the state of my health at the moment. For the first time in a long time—years, in fact—I don’t have anything that feels like it’s threateningly increasing in level of pain or discomfort. I’m incredibly weak—the “exercise” involved in walking around the house a bit and going up and down a flight of stairs leaves me winded and with leg muscles threatening to cramp. And I still have the pain in my throat and upper chest, although even that might be getting a little better. And my present level of comfort is, unfortunately, illusory. The chemotherapy course I went through in the autumn could knock the malignancies back, but could not “cure” them. So over time, residual cancers in my chest, lungs, and/or lymph system are recovering, growing, building toward the time when they become symptomatic and put me back on the path to discomfort and death.
But for the moment, I’m fine with the painful stuff receding, following the model of the maple leaf tattoo. I’ll feel as comfortable as I can for as long as I can. Then I’ll go back to war with the cancer, having had this nice break to rest up and recoup.
And I’ll keep you plugged in to how things progress. Remember this, because it’s important: live ‘em while you got ‘em, because they are NOT forever. But if you’re lucky, you might get to stretch ‘em out, kind of like I’m doing now!
Saturday, January 10, 2015
It Might Get Messy
When I was a kid, bowfishing—shooting fish with a bow and arrow—was a popular summer pastime. It’s easy enough to do—you fit a rig holding 25 or 30 yards of strong line to your bow, tether a barbed arrow to the string, shoot a fish, and reel it in with the line tied to the arrow. Pompton Lake and other local water bodies were loaded with enormous carp. Carp spawn in shallow water and make a noisy mess of things, thrashing around in the silty sediment of reed beds and lily pads. To hunt them down, you either wade through the goop or use a flat-bottom boat to get close enough to shoot.
Pompton Lake was also home to some enormous snapping turtles. We often caught them, sometimes eating them but usually just dumping them back in the lake where they sometimes made a spectacular ruckus by grabbing an adult swan’s leg and struggling for hours (and invariably failing) to make a hefty meal of the big bird.
One summer we caught two particularly large turtles—a 48 pounder and a 52 pounder. These we carried home to show off and contemplate the degree of difficulty that would be involved in converting them to soup. We ended up having my friend’s metal-worker father rivet engraved name and address plates in the edge of their carapaces, and carried them back to the lake and let them go.
Later in the year we sloshed out in the mud to join a guy already set up for bowfishing carp. But when we got close he got all excited. “Come see this. It’s awesome. I just shot it…”. Sure enough, it was our biggest turtle, name tag hidden under the goop covering the shell. The guy had put his arrow straight through the turtle from top to bottom, approximately dead center in the top shell. The guy was really proud of that turtle, and at first refused our pleas to cut it loose and release it. But when we scraped off the name plate and showed it to him, he grumbled, but snapped his arrow, pulled it out, and let the turtle race off the mud flat into deeper water.
We worried that the turtle had a lethal injury. From the placement of the arrow, it was a fair bet that it went through the liver and/or a kidney and a good chunk of the gastrointestinal system. But not to worry. In early autumn we rescued a duck from a turtle in shallow water, and it turned out to be the very same turtle. High fives all around, then. That turtle overcame devastating injuries, healed up, and lived a normal life (we ran into it several times in the next couple of years).
These days, I feel a deep kinship to that turtle. I’ve had some brutal shit done to my body, and I’m still living (although, I must admit, not living “normally”). Better than that, though, was the conclusion of an appointment with the oncologist on Thursday. Based on a CT scan taken while I was in the hospital for pneumonia a few weeks ago, it appears that the 6 rounds of chemotherapy did a good job. There is still a visible “abnormality” in each lung. Dr. T says that could be fluid, scar tissue, or malignancy. But both are relatively small. If they are cancers, we’ll have time to develop treatment options before they become too grossly symptomatic. And if they’re NOT cancers, well, I could consider myself cancer-free, at least for the moment.
This was by far the best possible outcome of all the chemo treatments. It’s not a magic bullet. I still have the mass in my chest cavity and associated pain in my throat and chest, my throat feels like it’s got a mass trapped in it much of the time, which interferes with keeping the plumbing clear of mucous and to an extent with breathing. And, most importantly, my cancers have been consistently viciously aggressive. Which means that where there ARE residual malignancies—in lungs or anywhere else—throat, lymph system, pleura, wherever—it won’t be a hell of a long time before I’m back to the ugliness of cancer therapeutics.
But not for the moment. I don’t need chemotherapy right now. I don’t need radiation right now. I just need to make myself as comfortable as I can with the residual damage from the past few years of cancer wars, work on gaining some strength, maybe gaining some weight.
So I’m probably not in as good shape as our enormous snapping turtle was, post-shooting. She recovered completely to continue her long reptilian life. I’m happy enough at the moment to have the treatments of the past years leave me in this position at this moment in my life. It probably won’t last. But it’s nice to have now.
Thanks for being here for me, everyone. I can’t say it enough—I know you’re out there pulling for me. Gives me extra strength for the cancer wars, and helps me through the residual pain and damage that keep me uncomfortable and crippled even as the cancers have receded. I love you all. And I thank you. Be sure to check back next week for a briefing on how my momentarily cancer-strong body is holding up!
PS—below I offer a few of the best photos of birds at the feeder on the front porch. Feeder’s been busy, given the cold weather and associated snow. Got a nice taxonomic diversity, all things considered. And I figure, given the hell that's being unleashed on the global social fabric at the moment, that we could all use a few moments to contemplate the peaceful and the pretty…remember in most browsers you can enlarge if you double-click on each photo...
Pompton Lake was also home to some enormous snapping turtles. We often caught them, sometimes eating them but usually just dumping them back in the lake where they sometimes made a spectacular ruckus by grabbing an adult swan’s leg and struggling for hours (and invariably failing) to make a hefty meal of the big bird.
One summer we caught two particularly large turtles—a 48 pounder and a 52 pounder. These we carried home to show off and contemplate the degree of difficulty that would be involved in converting them to soup. We ended up having my friend’s metal-worker father rivet engraved name and address plates in the edge of their carapaces, and carried them back to the lake and let them go.
Later in the year we sloshed out in the mud to join a guy already set up for bowfishing carp. But when we got close he got all excited. “Come see this. It’s awesome. I just shot it…”. Sure enough, it was our biggest turtle, name tag hidden under the goop covering the shell. The guy had put his arrow straight through the turtle from top to bottom, approximately dead center in the top shell. The guy was really proud of that turtle, and at first refused our pleas to cut it loose and release it. But when we scraped off the name plate and showed it to him, he grumbled, but snapped his arrow, pulled it out, and let the turtle race off the mud flat into deeper water.
We worried that the turtle had a lethal injury. From the placement of the arrow, it was a fair bet that it went through the liver and/or a kidney and a good chunk of the gastrointestinal system. But not to worry. In early autumn we rescued a duck from a turtle in shallow water, and it turned out to be the very same turtle. High fives all around, then. That turtle overcame devastating injuries, healed up, and lived a normal life (we ran into it several times in the next couple of years).
These days, I feel a deep kinship to that turtle. I’ve had some brutal shit done to my body, and I’m still living (although, I must admit, not living “normally”). Better than that, though, was the conclusion of an appointment with the oncologist on Thursday. Based on a CT scan taken while I was in the hospital for pneumonia a few weeks ago, it appears that the 6 rounds of chemotherapy did a good job. There is still a visible “abnormality” in each lung. Dr. T says that could be fluid, scar tissue, or malignancy. But both are relatively small. If they are cancers, we’ll have time to develop treatment options before they become too grossly symptomatic. And if they’re NOT cancers, well, I could consider myself cancer-free, at least for the moment.
This was by far the best possible outcome of all the chemo treatments. It’s not a magic bullet. I still have the mass in my chest cavity and associated pain in my throat and chest, my throat feels like it’s got a mass trapped in it much of the time, which interferes with keeping the plumbing clear of mucous and to an extent with breathing. And, most importantly, my cancers have been consistently viciously aggressive. Which means that where there ARE residual malignancies—in lungs or anywhere else—throat, lymph system, pleura, wherever—it won’t be a hell of a long time before I’m back to the ugliness of cancer therapeutics.
But not for the moment. I don’t need chemotherapy right now. I don’t need radiation right now. I just need to make myself as comfortable as I can with the residual damage from the past few years of cancer wars, work on gaining some strength, maybe gaining some weight.
So I’m probably not in as good shape as our enormous snapping turtle was, post-shooting. She recovered completely to continue her long reptilian life. I’m happy enough at the moment to have the treatments of the past years leave me in this position at this moment in my life. It probably won’t last. But it’s nice to have now.
Thanks for being here for me, everyone. I can’t say it enough—I know you’re out there pulling for me. Gives me extra strength for the cancer wars, and helps me through the residual pain and damage that keep me uncomfortable and crippled even as the cancers have receded. I love you all. And I thank you. Be sure to check back next week for a briefing on how my momentarily cancer-strong body is holding up!
PS—below I offer a few of the best photos of birds at the feeder on the front porch. Feeder’s been busy, given the cold weather and associated snow. Got a nice taxonomic diversity, all things considered. And I figure, given the hell that's being unleashed on the global social fabric at the moment, that we could all use a few moments to contemplate the peaceful and the pretty…remember in most browsers you can enlarge if you double-click on each photo...
Saturday, January 3, 2015
So, over this holiday, it’s become clear to me just how weird my life has become, psychologically and physically. I spend part of my days waiting to die, and part of them hoping for the miracle that will give me back the decades I’m going to lose. Physically, I wake up nearly every day battling intense nausea. If I can fight it long enough to get antinauseal wonder drug Zofran into my gut, my mornings are a lot easier and more pleasant. Now it’s been a while since my last chemotherapy infusion. To my surprise, my breathing is sometimes strong and clear (although the home nurse can hear congestion in my right lung, which worries her). This makes me think I should get some sort of exercise routine going, but this is very, very difficult. Just standing up and walking around, or going up and down one flight of stairs, puts me in a heavy oxygen debt and leaves me bent over and wheezing. About half the time, I can’t breathe comfortably in any case. Then I get claustrophobia and panic, just like in the old asthma days… .
Sigh. Nobody said, as my Mom used to tell me, that life (or death) was going to be easy. So I control what I can—I do a lot of reading, some writing, some music, some drawing, some photography. And I live with what I can’t. I do find myself daydreaming about my life, especially when somebody triggers some specific memory.
For example. When I was in the hospital last time, one of nurses was a bantamweight Chinese woman named Ruby. Her English was good, but she retained plenty of accent indicating she didn’t grow up here. So I asked her where she was from. After “China” I asked her where in China. She said “someplace you’ve never heard of. It’s a nothing city called Hefei in a nothing province called Anhui”.
Well, this was a bit of a shock for me. Both my trips to China in the 90s were specifically to Hefei City in Anhui Province. Which are indeed very obscure and impoverished places. So it was a shock for her as well. When I was there, there was only one western-style hotel in Hefei. Turns out she lived in the neighborhood just across the street from said hotel. She worked in the hospital in Hefei for 13 years, and has been in the U.S. for 7. I told her I had the best stir-fried snake of all the places I visited in Hefei. She said she wouldn’t touch it. She did start to miss her family’s home cooking, though. I explained to her that on my first trip, we were a state-sponsored and politically valued group. So we got to eat the very high-end of available banquet food. Turtle soup, for example, an incredibly rare and expensive delicacy. Here in the U.S., turtle soup is akin to a vegetable or creamy stew with turtle meat. In China, turtle soup is an intact dead turtle in a bowl of clear broth. You pull the turtle apart with chopsticks, and the senior woman at the table (this usually turned out to be our translator, who we brought in with us so as not to have to rely on local resources) got the shell, from which she nibbled the edges. Oh, and frogs. Frogs we DID get in a red-sauced stew. At one restaurant they assured us the frogs we were eating were exceedingly rare, almost extinct. This was by way of honoring us. I just glared at our team leader for the rest of dinner, to no effect.
Our big showcase meeting on my first trip was at an environmental research institute about a mile away from our hotel. Rather than travel in the big black car motorcade, I decided to walk. I got the hotel staff to write the address for me on a card, point me in the general direction, and off I hiked. Whenever I got lost, I’d be scratching my head and trying to match my paper up with any street signs. At that point, a crowd of laughing women would invariably come to my rescue. They would read my card, re-orient me in the proper direction, and push me gently on my way. I got to the place at the precise moment the black car motorcade pulled in through the gates.
The point is, I certainly can’t complain that I didn’t make the most of the life I was given. I have plenty to think about when I’m brooding, and plenty to chuckle over when I’m in a lighter mood. I can only commend to you the lesson I’ve taken from my late-in-life terminal cancer. And that is, of course, to live ‘em while you got ‘em, because they are NOT forever.
So have a good week, everybody. I hope your holidays were happy and you’re looking at a good winter ahead. Later this week I go see my oncologist. I’ll have news, presumably, at that point. Likely I’ll have to get ready to survive more rounds of chemotherapy. I’ll just have to hope I have the strength to get through it…I just have to live with the things I can’t control!
Sigh. Nobody said, as my Mom used to tell me, that life (or death) was going to be easy. So I control what I can—I do a lot of reading, some writing, some music, some drawing, some photography. And I live with what I can’t. I do find myself daydreaming about my life, especially when somebody triggers some specific memory.
For example. When I was in the hospital last time, one of nurses was a bantamweight Chinese woman named Ruby. Her English was good, but she retained plenty of accent indicating she didn’t grow up here. So I asked her where she was from. After “China” I asked her where in China. She said “someplace you’ve never heard of. It’s a nothing city called Hefei in a nothing province called Anhui”.
Well, this was a bit of a shock for me. Both my trips to China in the 90s were specifically to Hefei City in Anhui Province. Which are indeed very obscure and impoverished places. So it was a shock for her as well. When I was there, there was only one western-style hotel in Hefei. Turns out she lived in the neighborhood just across the street from said hotel. She worked in the hospital in Hefei for 13 years, and has been in the U.S. for 7. I told her I had the best stir-fried snake of all the places I visited in Hefei. She said she wouldn’t touch it. She did start to miss her family’s home cooking, though. I explained to her that on my first trip, we were a state-sponsored and politically valued group. So we got to eat the very high-end of available banquet food. Turtle soup, for example, an incredibly rare and expensive delicacy. Here in the U.S., turtle soup is akin to a vegetable or creamy stew with turtle meat. In China, turtle soup is an intact dead turtle in a bowl of clear broth. You pull the turtle apart with chopsticks, and the senior woman at the table (this usually turned out to be our translator, who we brought in with us so as not to have to rely on local resources) got the shell, from which she nibbled the edges. Oh, and frogs. Frogs we DID get in a red-sauced stew. At one restaurant they assured us the frogs we were eating were exceedingly rare, almost extinct. This was by way of honoring us. I just glared at our team leader for the rest of dinner, to no effect.
Our big showcase meeting on my first trip was at an environmental research institute about a mile away from our hotel. Rather than travel in the big black car motorcade, I decided to walk. I got the hotel staff to write the address for me on a card, point me in the general direction, and off I hiked. Whenever I got lost, I’d be scratching my head and trying to match my paper up with any street signs. At that point, a crowd of laughing women would invariably come to my rescue. They would read my card, re-orient me in the proper direction, and push me gently on my way. I got to the place at the precise moment the black car motorcade pulled in through the gates.
The point is, I certainly can’t complain that I didn’t make the most of the life I was given. I have plenty to think about when I’m brooding, and plenty to chuckle over when I’m in a lighter mood. I can only commend to you the lesson I’ve taken from my late-in-life terminal cancer. And that is, of course, to live ‘em while you got ‘em, because they are NOT forever.
So have a good week, everybody. I hope your holidays were happy and you’re looking at a good winter ahead. Later this week I go see my oncologist. I’ll have news, presumably, at that point. Likely I’ll have to get ready to survive more rounds of chemotherapy. I’ll just have to hope I have the strength to get through it…I just have to live with the things I can’t control!
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