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 When I came around and found my attacker, it turned out to be a large, outdated and mostly rotted campsite sign from years past.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!!!
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