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!
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...
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!
Christmas was magical. Certainly for me, almost by definition, since I expected to be dead or seriously dying by now. But everybody had a great time. Kim came over to help us celebrate. The kids made ravioli for Christmas Eve dinner, assuring one more generation knows and loves the quirky recipe that came in 1902 with the Italian side of my Mom’s family from the farming village of Pianozza in northern Italy. Christmas morning Molly made pancakes, sausage, and applesauce, dinner was a beautifully spiced pot roast. Awesome. Reminded me of the three-ring circus that the holidays were when I was growing up.
Winter holidays at the Pompton Lakes cottage were a mixed bag of traditions, improvisations, logistical nightmares, and general hilarity. The living room was smaller than the average bedroom in houses built in the 1980s. But into that room we crammed a Christmas tree (invariably the largest one my father could hide from my mother until time to set up), the only television, the only record player, all family and guests, plus drinks and food. There was an ancient German blown-glass ornament that my Dad’s father gave to my Mom. For some reason, she would hang it from the low ceiling entry to the dining room. And then, every time anybody produced a ball, a dart gun, or water pistol she would shriek “NOT NEAR THE GRAPES”! It became our favorite chant for the holidays. I wish I’d gotten a tattoo before my Mom died… .
Throughout the holiday season—which we stretched out to encompass my birthday on 12 January—we packed into the living room. Given small space and numerous relatives, we formalized a system of visits. Christmas Eve we went in to Union City, to the 27th Street row house my Mom grew up in. There, depending on the year, there could be the resident families, us, and other expats in from the suburbs, plus the next door neighbor (who still resided there some years ago when Molly and I visited the neighborhood). I would guess a typical Christmas Eve saw 2 dozen people cooking, arguing, conversing, drinking, and smoking. Essentially 100% of the adults were heavy smokers, and the airflow in a narrow city house was not particularly active. Sports were on TV in both main floor apartments (hard to believe they could cut one floor of a townhouse into two apartments), and alcohol flowed like…uh…alcohol. The Germans stayed away from the kitchen in favor of the Italians—we weren’t the slickest family in North Jersey, but when it came to food we weren’t idiots. Grandpa demanded we kids run his empty longnecks out into the stairwell and trade them for full, cool Knickerbockers. One of the cousins (still alive and retired in Florida) worked for an airline and received a smoked turkey as her annual bonus. This bird was eaten mostly as appetizer, along with a salad of shrimp and elbow macaroni in a mayonnaise dressing, followed by ravioli and then an unsmoked turkey, mashed potatoes, green beans, cranberry sauce, and gravy. People ate ravenously. Mostly because they wanted to get to the espresso and after dinner drinks. Debbie the Irish Setter—nobody ever explained how they ended up with an active sporting dog in a city apartment, especially since nobody in the family was particularly fond of dogs—hunted scraps all evening. Eventually, as the adults approached too-drunk-to-drive, we packed up presents and leftovers for the trip back out to Pompton.
Next morning, we did family presents and breakfast at home. Then we went out to my father’s family in Dumont and nearby Haworth. These visits started out rather small and quiet in a garden apartment until my Aunt Helen (Dad’s sister) had her 4 kids and they moved into a big house in Dumont a short walk from the Haworth house that Dad’s father still occupied. Then things achieved a fair portion of the craziness dealt with the evening before in Union City. In Dumont they had a roaring fireplace, color TV sets, and a large area of dining and sitting room decorated in pristine, bright white. WHAT WERE THEY THINKING??? Depending on how many of Uncle Tony’s relatives came out to visit, there would be anywhere from 7 to a dozen children running rampant. Carrying grape juice, coke, oily appetizers, etc. In a house decorated in pure bright white! Aunt Helen had the Zen of the holidays, though. She’d slurp a Manhattan, smoke cigarettes, and hope somebody else would pull and carve the turkey at suppertime. Her strategy worked great. We invariably had a great time, and after the two days of running parties, we kids were exhausted. I’m sure my parents were thoroughly hungover.
Everybody in our house was arc-welded to the education system. Both parents were teachers (except a number of years when my Mom was in business) and we were in school. So we all had the week off between Christmas and New Years. Dad was Department Head of English and Sociology, and was regular drinking buddies with 10 or 15 colleagues (including, for some reason, several defrocked priests. As a lapsed Catholic, Dad had an odd penchant for hiring same), all of whom, along with a few former students, stopped by to visit. Then my high school and later college friends, and then my sister’s, and then my brother’s, also came by. The teeny tiny kitchen produced snacks and appetizers like a James Beard catering operation.
Mom and Dad did a rotating New Year’s Eve party with other teachers. When they did it at our place, it required every square centimeter of open floor space to pack them all in. By the time I was in high school, my brother and sister and I served as caterers and waitstaff, since the kitchen was the only place left with room to breathe. I remember the year one teacher came without his wife, who sent him with huge trays of ham spread on toast that needed to be reheated in the oven. The guy was really proud of those canapés. Couldn’t talk about anything else. As we pulled them from the oven, I slipped and dumped one of the trays all over my shoes. We quickly swabbed down shoes, the floor, and the oven and dumped the evidence. Then we served the remaining toasts. The guy noticed instantly that we were missing half the toasts. We told him “they were so good, man, that we couldn’t help ourselves. We ate them while we were heating them up”. It is perhaps a measure of his alcohol consumption that he bought the story without a question.
And that last anecdote points the way to another rule I’ve had to add to my how-to book of life. It is simply this: “Roll With It”. When things happening are beyond your control, or have no easy fix, or maybe no fix at all, your best bet is to simply relax and let real life wash over and through you.
Of course, this new rule sits side-by-side with the other Zen acceptance aphorism, Live ‘em While You Got ‘em Because They Are Not Forever.
I have managed to learn a lot about myself as an outcome of my cancer and its treatment. Growing while dying, I am learning, is not only possible. It is necessary if I am going to survive for the maximum lifetime available. There is no sense trudging to death. I’d like to leave a better world behind me, maybe with just a little perspective arising from the debris of life associated with cancer.
So. I love you all. I miss you all. And I commend carefully managed acceptance of experience to you as one more tool to help keep your life running with the key in the ignition and a case of beer on the back seat. Rock and Roll, everyone!!!
PS--here's a photo from Beth of Christmas at the Pompton cottage:
Well, it’s been typical of the past couple of years. Saturday night I posted that chirpy, happy blog entry. Sunday night I was in the hospital with serious, dangerous pneumonia. This was a particularly difficult episode. Poor Cathy and the kids had just driven up from Atlanta after celebrating Colin’s graduation from Georgia Tech. The Emergency Room and hospital in general were backed up. We spent 14 hours in ER before getting a room. By that time I had thoroughly shit and pissed myself and had to be wiped down by morose technicians.
It took several days of high-power antibiotics to get the infection of both lungs under control. Then, out of the blue, my blood pressure spiked at stroke levels and I had to spend another day in hospital. Thursday they let me out, but only because Cathy is trained to administer the intravenous antibiotics. Which admittedly come with awesome technology. A little pressurized ball of meds screws into the port access (the “port” is the permanent needle embedded in a blood vessel at my heart. It’s a dangerous bit of infrastructure to fuck with, as any infectious organisms introduced are mainlined into heart and lungs). It empties itself automatically in about half an hour. Very simple, robust, and ingenious. Hopefully the week’s worth of biocides (plus an additional oral antibiotic) will keep me relatively healthy for a while. In any case, I’m finally home and getting warmed up for Christmas.
This is my time of year. With the fabulous Thanksgiving as a massively wonderful gift from all involved (thank you SO MUCH again everybody), Christmas is next. Of course, not only am I unable to do brick and mortar shopping, I was too sick right through the critical online ordering time. Basically, my gift to family and friends this year is pretty much confined to still being alive. Beth and Maggie made the Italian holiday bread, panettone-pan dulce, including the fussy task of candying the orange peel by hand. They did a hell of a job. Everyone who’s tasted it declares it phenomenal.
BTW, I use a grossly enriched version of the austere recipe my Mom recorded by following one of the Tanta’s (we called all the Aunties by the German descriptor, including the Italian ones responsible for the pannettone) around while she made it one year long ago. It goes something like this: mix 5 pounds of flour with 2 cups of sugar (preferably demerara, raw or if necessary light brown plus some white), salt, and yeast. Make a well. Break 10 eggs into the well. Heat about half a liter of milk and a pound of unsalted butter in the microwave. Being careful not to cook the eggs (maybe pour the milk and butter around the outside of the well), add the milk and butter. Mix and knead thoroughly. Note that this should be a soft but not sticky dough. You may need to add up to another half liter or so of milk. This can be warm, it doesn't need to be hot. Add the extra as early in the agglomeration process as possible to make its incorporation easier. The kneading is tedious and needs strong arms. Or you can do it 3 batches with a big-ass stand mixer. Let rise double in a warm spot covered with plastic wrap and towels. Cut home-candied orange peel (cook the peels of a couple of oranges, including the white pith, in a cup of water and a couple cups of sugar spiced with cinnamon, nutmeg, and allspice until soft) and dried cherries into bits. Knead the fruit in THOROUGHLY. Apportion the bread among about 10 pans (or flowerpots, or pie tins, or whatever you like). Rise double. Bake at 350 F until internal temperature reaches 200 F. Cool upside down on racks to maintain top crust. Wrap tightly when cool in foil and seal in ziplocs. Serve toasted with a load of unsalted butter.
With that said, I’m gonna be brief this week. You’re all busy, and I’m still very tired and weak from the hospital. I will give you a bit of my usual gratuitous and unnecessary advice, in keeping with the fact that every week I survive I feel a little wiser and much older. So: 1) touch somebody every day. Just reach out. You’ve got email, a cell phone, texting ability, social media. Don’t worry that they might not want to hear from you. Maybe they don’t. You’ll never know until you try. And the odds are, they will. And for god's sake don't worry about the "security" of your email. You're not Sony. North Korea is not trying to hack your gmail account. 2) Live ‘em while you got ‘em. They are absolutely, unequivocally NOT forever!
I love you. I thank you. I wish you a merry Christmas, a happy New Year, and a joyful Channukah.
2014. A year that reminded us of a couple of universal imperatives: 1 peace is a really good thing sociologically, environmentally, and economically, and 2 public health is a field of endeavor to which we should pay more…much more…attention.
OK. I hear your gears turning, attempting to winkle out [a British idiom based on the harvest of periwinkle snails from jetties and intertidal rocks, said snails are boiled and eaten hot with dipping sauces, a treat for visitors to the eternally chilly and windy UK coast, although David McCallum on NCIS contends his parents had to hold him down and physically force the little snails down his gullet] just why a sort of mediocre ecologist with a spotty academic record and compulsive interest in over turning rocks, especially in the intertidal zone of the nearest estuary, should be pontificating on matters of such weighty importance.
The answer, of course, is that said ecologist is also driven to compulsive pontification. And his ongoing trench war with various cancers gives him, he believes, a license to pontificate, sort of equivalent to Legislative approval of the Executive’s power to wage war. What this means in the short haul, of course, is that you are stuck with my pontificatory (actual word?) musings regarding the interface of science and sociology.
So, with licensure (actual word?) established, let’s rock!
But before we get to the larger, more important world, let’s do a quick review of my private, as opposed to public, health. In general, here inside my cancer-stricken anatomy, things aren’t too bad. I still have plenty of pain, and lack energy and ability to get around without stumbling and stopping every half dozen slow paces to catch my breath. On the other hand, I DO manage to catch my breath. This is a sign that the chemotherapy continues to function as intended. The tumor tissue in my lungs has been beaten back sufficiently that I am not wheezing, accumulating fluids, or struggling to get enough oxygen for my physiology to function. These are all good signs.
On the other other hand (see paragraph immediately about for initial “other”), all is not roses and chocolate dipped cherries. I’m having trouble generating the energy needed to do even the minimalist Christmas shopping I need to do (and which I love to do, the problem is that physically I just have trouble keeping functional long enough to get it done. On the other other other hand (I promise, that’s the last one of these sick little grammar jokes I’ll subject you to), Beth and Maggie have been here all week babysitting me while Cathy and the kids went to Atlanta to watch Colin graduate. In fact, due to Cathy’s astute attention and Beth’s and Maggie’s computer skills, I did get to watch the JumboTron pic of Colin receiving his diploma. Presumably. At Rutgers, we got empty tubes which allowed the administration to hold up our actual graduation until we paid our library and campus parking fines (I SWEAR). Actually, I skipped my mid-term graduation, so it wasn’t an issue for me. Pretty sure I have the diploma somewhere. Which is odd, because I’m also pretty sure I carried library and campus parking fines. Oh well. Institutions have their own pace and personality. Rutgers was slow and sloppy. Which is why it was such a perfect fit for me!
Anyway. Let’s give a quick once-over to matters of public health and global politics. Based on stories culled from this week’s Washington Post (print edition), we find:
• Ebola, in its vicious swath carved across the chronically impoverished landscapes of West Africa, caused the collapse of the fragile health infrastructure (such as it was) in the affected nations. This means that the thousands being killed by Ebola each multiplied its impact such that malaria, a true scourge in the region, plus sleeping sickness, dengue fever, schistosomiasis, and other massive health threats were released from any ability of the medical system to constrain their impacts. West Africa is now officially more of a mess than it was prior to the Ebola outbreak, which is rather stunning giving how fucked up said health care systems were in the first place
• There is a real crisis brewing in the global microbiological fauna. Drug-resistant microbes are universally present, and the proportion of the microbial ecosystem that is drug resistant increases constantly. A British-sponsored report by Rand and KPMG estimates 2 million drug-resistant cases and 23,000 deaths per year in the U.S. alone. Projecting that estimate across nations including China, India, Indonesia, Australia, and other populous places that need big-time food inputs, where such inputs are generated with the assistance of prophylactic antibiotics is a frightening exercise. Our children are going to live in a world where an infection is a very dangerous thing. A quick rinse and a band-aid are not going to be enough. And current research suggests that we can’t drug our way out of this. Antibiotic resistance is very difficult to constrain. At some point in the coming decades, this will be an issue of life-and-death importance.
• Finally, for the lighter side of things, let’s look at world peace. China, which finds the Nobel Peace Prize to be bigoted against Chinese patriots, issues an alternative, the Confucius Peace Prize. To compound the comedy, the winner this year is Fidel Castro! Man, sometimes you can’t make stuff up to compete with the real world.
Well, that’s a wrap for this week, everybody. I’m still alive, still marginally functional, still love you all and I feel your thoughts on my behalf. Hopefully this week I’ll be able to complete some rudimentary Christmas shopping—we’ll see. Check back to this time and space next week for your update.
And remember. Use ‘em while you got ‘em. Because they are definitely not forever. My love to each and every one of you!!!
Ah, the end of the year. Time for comforting, oddball, humorous, enumeration and commentary on twelve month’s worth of human endeavor. Been a strange and busy year here on earth, under the watchful eye of Santa and his elven spies determining who is “good” and who is not.
This year, we (that is, “we” as society—although it’s difficult to see a single “society” in a social structure that ranges from gleeful murder of relatives for sport in the impoverished Muslim Middle East to massive investment in the structure of subatomic particles in wealthy Europe, although the shocking racial disparities plaguing the U.S. revealed by recent reporting regarding murder and incarceration of unarmed civilians on the streets should give us some pause) asked Questions—big questions, maybe the biggest and most important ever asked. Do comets, billions of year-old remnants of the formation of the solar system, carry the chemistry of life? Can we, technically, make our way to Mars, most likely sister planet to earth in terms of potential for supporting or having supported life? What the hell is Pluto, a planet-ish object at the outer edge of the solar system (seems like something with the potential for a Star Trek/Star Wars plot involving a fake planet watching over the colony seeded on the third stone from the sun). Such questions are good for those of us with serious individual problems, like terminal illness. It gives us some perspective for our life and death. If we’ve left a fingerprint on things, it means we don’t “die” when our body does. Our contributions continue, we’re part of a human race moving forward. We’re more than the mass of carbon and energy comprising our corpus.
But let’s start at the small end of things. This week has been a strange one here in Cancer Land (trademark, copyright). I spent Monday having a chemotherapy infusion. Felt ok afterward—a good sign, since I really like to stay out of the hospital as much as possible. My red blood cell count was nominally low, so the docs and nurses had me back on Thursday for a couple units of whole blood. Which, for some reason, collapsed the copacetic comfort I’d been feeling all week. Thursday night I spent nauseous and vomiting. Friday I felt like hell. The nurse arrived Friday evening to sort out access to my circulatory system, and made some suggestions for improving my physical comfort. Finally Friday night I got some good sleep, and today, Saturday, I’m feeling better. Should be able to eat and drink today, important functions for a declining physiology.
At the start of this year, I didn’t expect to live to see the end of it. So it’s a tribute to the medical system that bought me another holiday season (at what I’m sure was an extravagant cost financially and technologically). For all the hassle, pain, drugs, and emotional turmoil, I’m still glad to be here. So that’s a plus. A little more time to watch my kids grow up, do a little writing, get some cut paper art pieces done (I’m working on a nice one as we “speak”). In other words, a little more life before things close out when the cancer finally overcomes the best medical responses available.
So, back to the big picture. Of course, it only took about 15 minutes for someone to spot a “large monastery-like building” on the surface of the comet when the photos started to come back (http://au.ibtimes.com/articles/575052/20141206/rosetta-comet-67p-alien-building-ufo-enthusiast.htm). Personally, it seems like an odd place to locate a monastery, but not a whole hell of a lot odder (more odd?) than the montane highlands of Tibet, which are ripe (rife?) with monasteries. According to the LA Times article about the Pluto probe (http://www.latimes.com/science/sciencenow/la-sci-sn-pluto-new-horizons-hibernation-nasa-20141205-story.html) the resolution of its cameras will allow things like monasteries to be imaged. Which is good. Now we can tell if quirky religious institutions are universal or not. Seems like an important question, no?
Or at least an interesting one. A final note regarding things here on earth. I was reminded today by good friends visiting Miami to kick off the holidays that a Cuban seafood place called Malaga, located near the intersection of 8th and 8th (740 SW 8th Street, I believe) has been excellent every time I’ve been there. The Sangria is fresh and tart, and they’ll bring the snapper to your table for approval before frying it for you with fragrant spices. Of course, the last time I was there personally was in…probably…oh, say, 1985. But a quick check of the reviews under “Cuban Seafood” in local papers and web sites suggest that their standards have not slipped.
This coming week, Cathy, Molly and Jesse converge on Atlanta for Colin’s graduation from Georgia Tech. Beth and Maggie will be coming out from California to baby sit me, with initial assistance from Jesse who will hang around a couple extra days due to his back-breaking work and school schedule. Personally, I’ll have my butt parked in my hospital style bed, doing some internet shopping, reading and writing, art work, etc. Have a great kick-off to the holidays, everyone. Family, friends, food, drink and ritual—those are the truly important things in life. Take it from someone who’s learning the hard way. I love you all. Talk to you next week!
Oh yeah. PS: Live 'em while you got 'em. Because they are NOT forever. Far from being useless, day-to-day celebration is good for the soul. And orchestration of such celebration is a critically important component of the holidays in which we ground much of our yearly investment of time, money, energy, humor, and love. So rock on all. It's that time of year again!
