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!
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
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!!!
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… .
