But here’s the thing. I’m actually supposed to be dead now. In the timeline my physicians and I worked out over the past few years, I should’ve gone down sometime over the autumn or winter. You all should have had your chance to grieve (which I hope you will keep to the socially acceptable minimum, I’m not really the kind of character who deserves a whole lot of moist sadness when I check out of this restaurant and head for home). And then your chance to have a wicked series of blow-out parties in my honor. If you really want to have fun, you can track a nifty cartoon of my lifetime in the beverages served. Start with warm gin poured directly into partially-dumped-out cans of 7-UP (our high school standard). Move on to college: Colt 45 Malt Liquor, Boone’s Farm Apple Wine, and Southern Comfort (I actually have no idea if any of these products are currently manufactured and sold. I’m sure you can find viable substitutes. Think “cheap” and “high-alcohol content”). Grad school—the cheapest beer available. We used to drink Red, White and Blue (the downmarket product of Pabst Blue Ribbon, hard as it is to believe that PBR wasn’t “downmarket” enough on its own). We liked it because the RWB cans were slightly skinnier and taller than standard soda cans, so if we drank while driving we could cut the top off a coke can, slip in the RWB can, and feel relatively secure cruising along Route 17). Early career—jug wines will do. Of course, what’s sold in jugs (and boxes) these days would have qualified as high-point varietals back in those days. Still, you’ll get the relative context. Oh. Throw in a bottle or two of Wild Turkey bourbon. When I spent 3 months living in a semi-dry (and untoileted) log cabin on the Potomac River wildlands in the 70s, the Turkey was a nice touch for watching sunsets over the river. When you get through all that crap, you can finally give yourself a break. Get ahold of some seriously massively fruity, thick and syrupy, hugely fragrant, Robert M. Parker style reds and whites. I preferred big-ass Zinfandels for reds and Viognier for whites, but anything that is viscous enough to require ketchup-bottle rapping on the bottom to get it to flow into the glass will suffice. By the time I got to this point in my drinking career, I had pretty much given up getting trashed and driving as sequential activities. I suggest either walking home or passing out on-site, and dealing with the hangover in the morning. For the latter, you will find a good old fashioned diner, serving enormous breakfast omelets with plenty of fried potatoes and buttered toast, along with mightily fragrant coffee, will work fabulously.
Which brings us pretty much up-to-date, where I continue to deal with the oral cavity cancers no doubt triggered by that long, fun career of alcohol consumption. I seem to have remained physiologically stable for another week. And every week that I’m stable is another week I’ve stolen from death. There are innumerable “lesions” throughout my lungs and the chest cavity into which the lungs fit. The doctors are careful to state in formal reports that these could be “scar tissue” or “inflammation” associated with chemotherapy and radiation. But the probability of the “lesions” (a medical/physiological term applied by lazy and/or underfunded researchers for localized ugliness that nobody has the interest in or money available to ascertain their precise nature. We ecologists use the term for everything from visible tumorous growths to scabs or cuts on the mice, fish, snakes, lizards, birds, etc. that we study in the field) being cancers or pre-cancerous blobs is at least as high as the more benign alternatives. The bottom line is that I am long past the possibility of magic bullets, miraculous recoveries, or unexpectedly successful treatments. Sometime in the relatively near future, at least a few of those “lesions” scattered throughout my thoracic infrastructure will spring to cancerous life. While the docs anticipate re-starting treatments when the time comes, they acknowledge the reality that the efficacy of any of the applicable treatments is now much lower than when they were first-employed novelties to naïve cancer cells. Through 4+ years of treatment and inter-treatment recovery interregnums (is that a word? Should it be a Latinized formulation like “interregna” or “interregnae”? You know, if I wanted to be clear and unpretentious, in the Strunk and White sense, I would probably use the word “periods” in its place. But I say fuck it. I’m staying with the snooty-scientist-uses-big-words communication technique here), the cancers have been evolutionarily modified to be less sensitive to specific treatments and even whole treatment categories.
Which means I’m fighting an inevitable losing war. Please pardon an imperfect and ridiculously overblown analogy. 300 Spartan warriors and 700+ Thespians and Thebans (with a few hundred additional warriors from other, smaller City-States) halted the advance of a conquering Persian army of hundreds of thousands of elite troops for three crucial days in 480 BC on a mountain trail at a spot called Thermopylae (“hot gates”, for some reason). The time the Spartans and their understudies bought for the Greeks allowed the Greek navy to decimate the Persian fleet, and for the orderly and complete abandonment of Athens, the primary target of Persian wrath. While Athens burned to the ground, the populace was off in the deep agricultural hinterlands, chuckling at Themistocles’ successful strategic endeavor, eating olives and drinking retsina. The Persians went on to ransack almost all of mainland Greece, but were unable to locate and kill or suborn large numbers of local people. When the Persians finally quit in frustration (and running out of cash to fund the operation), the Greeks simply rebuilt the infrastructure of towns and cities and moved back in. The decline of traditional city-state political operations was way shorter and less destructive than it would have been otherwise. The relatively short delay in Persian conquest changed the world forever by uniting disparate Greek populations into a single nation and preserving important social processes such as democratic elections of leaders (albeit with voting rights limited largely to powerful and wealthy men), public debate about critical issues of the day and voting for response priorities and activities, voting for how public funds were to be used, and others.
It is not an exaggeration to see unimpeded Persian conquest (i.e., without the Battle of Thermopylae) resulting in gross distortion and even loss of Greek legacies in politics and governance, war, trade, economics and financial innovations, public health, and societal decision making on major public expenditures. In other words, without Thermopylae, the world today would have been a very far cry from what it is now. To be blunt about it, think “no Thermopylae, no democracy.” Also consider a lengthy list of freedoms and political innovations that kicked Western civilization into high gear, matching and eventually surpassing those of the great civilizations in the east.
OK, I think the above is plenty to illustrate the importance of Greece to the modern world, and the importance of Thermopylae to Greece. The analogy with my health runs something like this: for a long time, my physiology festered in the face of cellular challenges, as the relationship between Greece and Persia deteriorated over the sequential tenures of three big-time kings—Cyrus, Darius, and Xerxes (skilled military leaders all, as my radiologist, surgeon, and oncologist are skilled medical leaders). The long festering reached the breaking point during the reign of Cyrus, my festering pre-cancerous lesions went over the top when the surgeon ran an emergency bioassay with tissue scraped from the tumors on my tongue and parotid gland. Surgeon handed me off to the Radiologist, who battled some of the malignant tissues, as Cyrus handed the “Greek Problem” to Darius. My radiologist got out of the way and handed me off to surgeon and oncologist as Darius stepped aside in favor of Xerxes. My doctors struggled with the maturity and aggressiveness of the cancers, as Xerxes struggled with the invasion and finally spread his forces across the Grecian landscape. Eventually the Persian presence in Greece cost more than it was worth, and the Persians retreated. Although they didn’t go far, and they were around to impede Alexander’s later spread across the lands of western Asia and deep into the east. My docs pounded the fighting present and future of the big, painful malignant growths in my oral cavity. Finally, Alexander conquered and consolidated disparate nations, cities and towns, and their natural resource foundations. Finally likewise, my cancer is going to conquer my disparate physiological and anatomical infrastructure, and kill me.
OK, you caught me. This analogy is clumsy and forced. It generates precious little insight into the cognitive implications of cancer. I’m afraid that, as weak as this “Analogic Analysis” is, I rather like it.
One of my fondest hopes, should it turn out that I am drastically wrong about the implications of death and there IS some form of afterlife, are to high-five Themistocles, Leonidas, Cyrus, Darius, and Xerxes. Oh, in addition to Jimi, Janice, Jim Morrison, Dime Bag Daryl, Keith Moon, John Entwistle, Charles Darwin, Wasily Kandinski, et al.
That wraps it up for this week. I’m doing well. I’m still alive. Spring is here. It’s time to not only live ‘em while you got ‘em, but to live ‘em really intensely as the ecosystem changes almost before your eyes as spring advances. Remember I love you all. Have a fantastic spring 2015, everybody!! And thanks, of course, for being here with me.
For your amusement and edification (sp?), I append a few photos I took this week of our suburban landscape coming to biological life. Enjoy!
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