This is a hard entry to write. Please bear with me. I might drift off the track some or get lost in irrelevancies. But I’ll work to keep it on point and target-centered. If I wander, just walk with me a few steps. We’ll get back to the path together. I promise.
Messy comes in many varieties. There’s purposeful, directional, forward-looking messy. This is the kind of mess you find in the laboratories of scientists headed for breakthroughs, novelists finishing masterpieces, painters getting those last strokes onto a long worked and re-worked canvas. It’s the kind of messiness that, in the end, is irrelevant. Tracking backward from the finished product, you can trace the threads of its maturation, growth and birth through the piles of shit left along the way—the heaps of empty paint cans, stacks of books and papers, empty coffee containers, and pizza boxes. The mess, in this case, is a means to an end. And so, in a twisted way, possessed of an odd kind of inherent interest, kind of the way projectiles dug from the soil of civil war battlefields, the latter as close to a “perfect” mess as it may be possible to contemplate, are artifacts linking the messy process it took to get there to the outcome that made a world a damn site less messy than before.
Then there’s messy that’s just a mess. Because we live in a universe defined by dimensions of space and time, “mess” is not stasis. It fluctuates, sometimes bigger, sometimes smaller, always pushing forward, like a mole rat hell bent on moving 10 or 15 meters of African desert soil from its tubular highway to a heap on a roadside. But it doesn’t necessarily have a purpose, a direction, an objective. It’s just the mess that goes with life and living.
Or with death and dying. The universe as a whole doesn’t care who or what is alive and losing entropy or dead and re-upping the entropy supply. It may ultimately be that the universe likes having entropy compiled and then dissipated, a process that produces order from the cold fragments of black eternity. But I’m not prepared to go there yet. I’m only prepared to say that I don’t think the universe gives a rat’s ass whether it’s my butt using energy to keep entropy at bay, or something else—like maybe an actual rat’s ass.
Friday I went in for a PET scan. That’s the one where they inject me full of radiolabeled glucose, wait a while until the tissue starts to accumulate same in proportion to metabolic activity, and then image the residual radioactivity, yielding a graphic showing metabolic hotspots, which in a healthy human include such high-energy machinery as the brain, liver, kidneys, and heart. In an unhealthy human, malignant tumors rock and roll on that fludeoxyglucose, slurping it like an Ann Rice character lost in Texas Chain Saw movie.
The accessibility of the software seems to vary from visit-to-visit. This time, I’ve not been able to get the clearest or easiest-to-see images for you. Which actually makes the point rather vehemently. What I CAN see in these images is frightening. And you’re talking about a guy who thought he had seen “frightening” become passé in the years of radiation exposure, chemical treatment, and surgery.
The PET scan image above shows my brain in bright red and orange shows that the brain tissue is doing what it does—work. Hard. All the time. The human brain is massively energetically expensive. The bright color in the images demonstrates that the radiolabeled sugar is being absorbed rapidly and massively and used in place to make sure that my mind is…uh…minding the store, so to speak.
Now, one of the other figures is the scary one.
The image above shows a disembodied orange spot in the middle of my neck. That has no business being there. The normal tissue there plugs away at a none-too-swift metabolic rate, maintaining the mucosal surface, operating the swallowing and speaking muscles, generally just making sure things run smoothly. The fact that there is a bright shiny hotspot of radiolabeled glucose uptake there in that region of mostly slow chugging tissue is a really bad thing.
My friends, I haven’t begun to come to grips with the meaning of all this. I do know that treatment options are a lot more limited this time. My body’s taken pretty much all the radiation dosimetry it can take for quite a while, so generic radiation treatment is out of the tool kit. Leaves us with chemotherapy and surgery. Neither one sounds particularly attractive to me at his point. I’ve been getting better and better, my voice becoming more understandable, my energy level increasing, my grip on life becoming tight again. I taught the first class of the semester on Thursday night, and the kids could understand me just fine.
Let’s hope that whatever has to be done to fix this new physiological contretemps means the students can understand my voice all the way through the semester. That’s gonna be my benchmark for this one. If I can teach the full class without drastic remedial activities of any kind, I’ll take it as a good sign.
Next week, I expect Dr. H to look over these PET and CAT scans and schedule an MRI in prep for surgery. I’ll keep you plugged in. I’m a little concerned about this recurrence, I have to admit. I’ll need all of you out there pulling for me this time. Thanks for being here for me!!!
We spend a lot of our life between things. Between lovers. Between jobs. Between classes. Between houses. Between meals. And at the margins, between life and death. Living between things is, I think, a good place to be. It means you believe in the future. That something has passed to the…uh…past, and now you’re just waiting for the future end of that track to poke you in the ribs and say hello. It means you’re not living in the past, surviving on memories and leaving the future to its own devices. It makes you a player in the game of life, puts you in the position of having finished x, now must do y; having seen a time to see b, having experienced t, now ready for t +1.
Of course, not everything fits easily into this benign model of the present linkage of immediate past to immediate future. There are many things it’s best not to be between. Between wars. That’s never worked out very well as a stepping stone. Between hammer blows. Of whatever kind. Between good and evil. It may be where we’re stuck, but it’s not a comfortable place to be.
Now I’ve got a new one for you. Between tumors. From 18 months ago, when the final set of post-treatment biopsies and remote sensing data showed me to be cancer-free, until Friday last (that would be 18 January 2013) when Dr. H told me the tissue taken the prior week was indeed malignant, I had been between tumors.
In the not-so-remote past of cancer therapy, “between tumors” was about as good as it got as a treatment outcome. Nobody would or could say cancer was “cured”. Your cancer was “in remission”. Could return any time. Often would return. If you made it past your 5 year survival date without a newly positive diagnosis, you would feel comfortable that you had “beaten” cancer. Still came with the nagging assumption that you could be stricken at any moment, but the longer things went, the closer to “cured” you were.
Nowadays, people really do talk about “curing” specific cancers. Localized tumors, even if they’ve anastomosed, can be identified, delimited, eliminated, and, with conscientious follow-up monitoring and treatment, in many cases that was it. The cancer was over. You were, as a practical if not theoretic matter, cured.
But not me. On Friday the biopsy results came back positive. I have another tumor in my throat, pretty close to where the original primary was, deep on my tongue muscle. It’s actually pretty active, now that I know it’s there. It’s pumping out its own mucous cap a couple times a day, and it’s starting to generate some aching pain of its own. Fortunately at the moment I have open scrips for both Xanax and Oxcycodone, a couple of each at bed time lets me sleep despite the creeping growth of out-of-control throat tissue working actively to make what’s left of my life miserable and short.
Well, that at least ain’t gonna work. I turned 60 years old on 12 January, and my brain feels like it’s younger and more open to new learning than it has ever been before (the rest of my body, not so much, but that’s a different story). I don’t really know the implications of this recurrent cancer. Dr. H sounded pretty disgusted, or maybe discouraged is closer, on the phone on Friday. But he’s had the weekend to think about it. End of this week, he’ll have PET and CAT scan output to look out, I’m betting I’ll be in for another MRI the following week. And by then Dr. H’ll have a concept, a plan, and a timeline. And we can have it.
Somehow, I thought I was getting away too easy from this cancer stuff. Guess that was true. Time to strap the gear back on, pack in the ammo, and stumble back into the trenches. Am I ready for it? We’ll just have to see. Haven’t had cause to whine yet, which I’ll take as a good sign. Hang in there, everyone. Having you out there in the world is a huge part of what makes me strong here in my little corner. Love you all. Better update, hopefully with cool graphics, next weekend. Hola, everyone!!
I was pretty sick the last time Nurse C took care of me. That would have been a year-and-a-half-ago, when I was admitted via the emergency room, required a couple units of blood, and was generally as close to physiological collapse as I ever expect to be. At least until I DO physiologically collapse.
Nurse C, sole post-surgery attendant hanging around the recovery rooms on Friday, remembered our past meeting. She says I look “good”. Which I know, now that I am a 60-year old cancer survivor, is a comparative thing. I do not look “good” on any rational objective basis. And a comparative thing that can only be taken so far down the metaphorical path. I’m sure I look “good” now compared to the skeletal 187 pounds of painfully bruised and dehydrated prosciutto I was the last time I chatted with Nurse C. Otherwise, I look like an unattractive 60-year old cancer survivor.
Be that as it may. My purpose in being in the operating room on Friday was to be biopsied following a nasty bleeding incident and discovery of strip of torn tissue in the back of my throat. The intervening couple of weeks had not been particularly uncomfortable. My throat wasn’t clear, but it wasn’t clogged, either. Let’s call it “perturbed”.
Still, Dr. H is solicitous of my throat. He worries about it. Which is good. I can worry about it, but having no real understanding of the shifting tides of cancerous tissues, my worry is that of an amateur. Dr. H is a professional. He knows what to worry about and why.
He says my throat tissue remains fragile. That irritating foods are plausible causes of bleeding wounds. This continues to shock me. I can’t believe we’ve more or less permanently rendered my oral mucosae so sensitive that I can’t eat without painful discomfort. But that seems to be where we are.
So here’s a photo of my generally irritated throat. There’s apparently nothing characteristically carcinogenic about this line of scabby tissue. The fact that it has appeared is enough to render it suspicious.
So Dr. H had the anesthesiologist put me under and slipped the knives in to excise some of the scab. Here you can see the scalpel and the rectangle of flesh ready to be pulled out and dropped into the vial.
And the post-surgery tissue, ready to recover.
Dr. H figures to get biopsy results back middle of this coming week. In the meantime, he does not seem all that impressed with the inflamed spot of interest in this round. He thinks it has a fair chance of being malignant, but that it is compact and could be treated rapidly, easily, and surgically.
Which is good. Not sure I’m ready to go through another course of radiation and chemotherapy, at least not the intensive twice-a-day treatments I got in the first round. Conversely, I’m hoping to be left with enough functional mucous membrane in my oral cavity to be able to talk, eat, and breathe. Maybe not comfortably, but functionally.
Hopefully I’m there. We’ll find out later this week. If this tissue isn’t malignant, I’m going to take that as a very good sign. And if it is, I’ll take Dr. H’s confidence in its compact treatment as a good sign. Either way, let’s say it looks like I’m getting closer to closing out my cancer.
Then back to dealing with real life. I wonder if I’ll miss the distraction?
In 1883 in the morgue deep in the bowels of the Berlin City Hospital (I do not in fact know that the morgue was “deep in the bowels” of the building. I make the assumption for purposes of narrative interest), a guy named Hans Christian Gram was trying to find a way to make bacteria stand out from lung tissue in microscope slides prepared from tissues of pneumonia patients. Gram devised a procedure by which the thick sugar-and-protein cell wall of certain bacteria could be stained purple, via a method that left bacteria lacking the peptidoglycan layer pink. For a long time, Gram staining was a critical method in bacterial identification and description.
Many human pathogens are Gram positive. And many of the most ubiquitous antibiotics work by interfering with the production of the thick layer of sugar and amino acids that characterize Gram positive bacteria. Streptococcus and Staphylococcus are both Gram positive.
When I was a kid, I had bad lungs. I know that’s not very specific. My lungs definitely were bad. I had chronic asthma, which occasionally erupted into acute asthma, and often tended to devolve into bronchitis, inflammation of the upper respiratory tract.
Occasionally, the bronchitis would slip deeper and more permanently into my lungs as pneumonia. On the fundamental assumption that my lung infection was of streptococcal origin, at this point Dr. G would start me on antibiotics and send off a swab of tissue for culture identification. Generally by the time the lab results came back, the antibiotics had corralled the infection and I was on the mend, winding down from heavy dosages of norepinephrine, room-temperature apple juice, and weak tea with honey (but NOT with the shot of gin that Armenian-born and Soviet-trained Dr. G recommended, because gin and tea is absolutely disgusting, sick or not), and finally getting some sleep because I could lay almost horizontal without shutting down my respiratory system.
Except one time. My asthma acted up, bronchitis arrived, pneumonia crashed my lungs. Dr. G gave me antibiotics and sent off a sputum sample. I remained drastically ill. Serious difficulty breathing. Increasingly intense asthma. An all-around respiratory mess that dragged on and on.
The lab results came back. Turned out I did have a bacterial, not a viral, infection. But it was Gram negative. The “normal” antibiotics had no constraining effect on its reproduction. As soon as we swapped meds to one that would wack the cell wall construction of my Gram negative inhabitants, the pneumonia loosened up and I started to recover. Was an uncomfortable couple of weeks.
I was reminded of that incident earlier this week. The antibiotics Dr. K gave me for a possible sinus infection, which treatment had Dr. H’s concurrence, were having no noticeable effect. My throat was swollen, pain was increasing, swallowing was increasingly impaired. In the short term, I kind of thought I’d feel better with the infection knocked back by the antibiotics, and that there would follow a slow increase in throat irritation as the new damaged tissue that Dr. H discovered expanded.
Instead, my throat continued to hurt for a couple days after the antibiotic prescription ran its course. Then it started to feel better. Less pain. Less disruption. Less blockage. Less ickiness. And definitely less mucous.
My speech has been responsive to my Arabic exercises. I don’t hurt down in my throat. I got all my pre-operation tests out of the way last week. On Friday I go under the knives for Dr. H to slice biopsy samples from the back of my throat. Until a few days ago, I thought this was an exercise in futility. That there was clearly new tumor tissue sprouting around my mouth, tongue and throat. Now I’m not so sure. I think it’s possible there’s just another nasty sore spot left over from the radiation. The way long time ago radiation.
But that’s where we are at the moment. I’m optimistic. My mouth’s not sore. Swallowing still sucks, but I’m moving back toward solid food, lacking the pain that would justify skipping it. With a little luck, I’ll have a productive week at work, and a negative biopsy on Friday.
That would set me up for a wonderful winter. If I don’t have to be treated again, so that I can continue to reconstruct my professional life with duct tape and super glue, I’ll be happy. And healthy. Er. Healthier. I gotta live with the reality of an impaired oral apparatus. But if it’s not a recurrent malignant impairment, things’ll just be rosy. This week? Set me among the living, and the happy to be alive. And we’ll just have to wait and see what the biopsy results are before we decide which bucket to dump me in next week.
Not as messy as if the Mayans, the Egyptians, Nostradamus, the Greeks, the Romans, the Rosicrucians, the Martians, the Alien, the Predators, the Blob, He, She, It, Them, The Thing, and the giant terrorizing rabbits (!) from “Night of the Lepus” were right and we’d vaporized on 21 December last week. But still sloppy, if not apocalyptic.
When I was in school (and I was in school for a long time), I lived one year in a communal house with a doctoral candidate who had dedicated his Master’s thesis to Marshall McLuhan. In fact, his introduction said something like “this thesis should be considered an appendage to the work of Marshall McLuhan.”
I read a bunch of McLuhan when I was a kid, and I was never really sure what his “work” actually was. As a semi-impoverished academic in an obscure field (usually described as “philosophy of communication theory”), my impression was that he spent most of his time hustling for enough income to support himself and his family. Still, the man who told us "the media work us over completely…so pervasive are they in their personal, political, economic, aesthetic, psychological, moral, ethical and social consequences that they leave no part of us untouched, unaffected, or unaltered” has to be given his due. Especially since he divined that in 1967. I’m sure he’d be apoplectic here in the 2010s, where corporate interests are shared among weapons manufacturers, mass media, news reporters, news makers, drug makers, political powers, and those who set policy for all that and more.
Nor was I sure how a guy who’s master’s was kind of a think-piece essay on advertising theory fit into a school of oceanography. Turns out in general that he didn’t, and he eventually drifted into computing and IT. Go figure. I’m still grateful to him, though. He was one of the few people who understood that physiological constraints of my chronic asthma could be bypassed by preparing marijuana as ingestible brownies.
Anyway. One of the things McLuhan would be useful for, were he still around, would be to help us sort out how generational growth and accumulation affect media. Specifically, a line like “Just when I think I’m gonna make it out…they…pull...me…back…in”. The line is actually from the third Godfather film. But it’s been a standard since then when a movie quote was warranted, and was especially favored in TV series The Sopranos. So what you have now is a line that one generation thinks is from the Sopranos, one missed and just has to muddle through, and one older one that knows it from its actual source.
Am I overthinking this? It just seems like something that would have interested McLuhan.
Anyway, I used that line the other night because I now suspect that this new growth that Doctor H spotted down in my throat actually may be a problem. Last time we did this (what, 6, maybe 8 weeks ago?), I had a painful sore in my throat. The pain subsided the morning Doc H did the biopsy, and the biopsy, despite Dr H’s pessimism (he told Cathy and Molly he was pretty sure it was malignant) was negative. This time, Doc H was checking me for a palate infection and happened to notice the ugly throat sore, which did not hurt at that time.
It does hurt now. Hurts enough that I’ve pretty much slid back off solid food and onto full time chocolate milk. And that spot is generating its own brand of thick, icky mucous, interfering with both breathing and speaking.
Which is the real frustration. If this turns out to be malignant and I have to be treated again, I’m going to be really ticked off. I’ve just about worked my way back to being a functional professional. I can do public speaking and be understood. I can travel and not be daily exhausted. I can work days of reasonable length, and balance multiple projects. I can sell and do projects. With the great patience and assistance of my professional colleagues, I’ve finally gotten HEALTHY again.
If I have to go back into the bowels of the medical system and be irradiated and chemo-treated and get weak and screw up my speaking I am going to be really really pissed off at the universe. Which, as we’ve established over the almost two-year life span of this whiney cancer weblog, is completely pointless and a waste of rage that might be channeled productively elsewhere. We’ll see. This week I go to my GP’s office for the pre-op stuff required by the anesthesiologist’s or the surgeon’s insurance company (blood physics, chemistry and biology, EKG), the following week I’m back under the surgeon’s knives to have tissues for the bioassay carved out of my throat. Updates next week, all. With a little luck, the following week I’ll have more photos of my throat and some idea regarding Dr. H’s preliminary visual take on the bad spot.
But there is this. We’re all here to walk away from one more New Year. And THAT’S something to celebrate!!!!!!
When I was a kid, the world was young. My parents lived through World War Two—the attic at the cottage in Pompton Lakes was stuffed with, among other stuff, a fat file of newspapers and magazines from the war, including the big headlines on the New York City papers from VE and especially VJ days. People kept quiet about sex (when I was near puberty, my folks took a half dozen books out of the library and scattered them around the house for one six-week return cycle) and drugs (you can’t imagine the chain of events perpetrated by the afternoon I was alone in the house and got to watch the lady from next door sneak in through the back porch to get her day’s fix of alcoholic beverages from our collection on the kitchen counter). Self-expression was a little more…inhibited. You seldom heard people swear in public unless in pain or drunk. You NEVER saw people swear in writing except for the shocking (SHOCKING) use of raw language by Hemingway, Ginsberg, et al. No, the proper way to indicate swearing in print was the top row of the typewriter, caps: !@#$%^&*()_)(*&^%$#!@#$%^&. Nowadays, drugs are less universal (if measured by the standard of tobacco use), sex is physiology not taboo, and, hell, language in communications media, including what’s left of print media, is what it needs to be.
But there’s still applicability to be wrung from the old-fashioned #$%^&*&^%. Now, it’s for expressing frustration nominally beyond swearing. You use that top row of the keyboard when you’d have to chain so many nasty adjectives and/or adverbs together that you’d lose impact.
I tend to stick %^&*(*&^ in the subject line of work emails. I don’t worry so much about language in the body of emails (what are they gonna do, fire me?), even after years ago my boss had to take me aside to make me understand that my use of the “all company” address list to circulate my suggestion that everyone drop their pants and moon their neighbors on the night Frank Zappa died indicated something less than a fully mature professional ethic. And had ticked off a number of more sensitive, mostly administrative or clerical people (be an interesting study to ascertain why) nationwide.
Anyway. Early this week, I sent a “$%^&*(*&” email updating my medical condition to a few of my colleagues who are also close friends. Here’s the deal:
Last weekend, my mouth was fussy. Lots of goop (i.e. sticky mostly dried mucous) from the roof of my mouth. Some generalized pain as well, although more nagging than acute. I felt like it might be an infection in my mouth, possibly up in my palate somewhere. So on Monday I called my GP’s office and made an appointment for Wednesday morning.
Monday I got home, farted around, read just about to the finish of the Gospel of Mark (I’m now deep into Luke, timing things beautifully this year, I can’t wait to see the Pope and the creepy ceramic Christ figurine at midnight on Christmas Eve mass), and started the second volume of Laini Taylor’s OUTSTANDING Y.A.D. series that began with Daughter of Smoke and Bone and has now moved on to Days of Blood and Starlight. When time for bed, I did my usual toilette, rinsing my mouth preparatory to brushing my teeth (or “brosse les dents” as I believe Ms. Azvadorian, delightful language teacher from PLHS, would have put it).
Which elicited a shocking effusion of blood. Fresh, bright red blood, with clotty hunks mixed in. Once I’d broken the dam by mouth rinsing, the blood just poured out. I tried to estimate the volume while I worked to a) reduce the loss rate, and b) localize the source in my oral cavity. I estimated somewhere between 100 and 200 milliliters of blood before the flow stopped, more or less on its own. Nor could I see any obvious source.
But flushing a deciliter or two of blood in a sudden incident is a bit shocking. I couldn’t make my mouth repeat the bleeding, but on Tuesday I called my oncologist’s office to let him know I was going to see my GP. His administrator actually tracked him down and made him take the call, and he told me to come in so he could scope my throat.
Which worked out well. My GP can’t do throat scoping. He said “Huh. Maybe it’s a sinus infection. Let’s try some antibiotics” and gave me a scrip for a big-ass jar of amoxicillin plus clavulanate potassium. That was like 10 in the morning. So I drove to the office, worked for a few hours, then whipped back up and around the Baltimore Beltway to see Dr. H at GBMC in Towson.
He was upset about the bleeding incident, and frustrated that it didn’t repeat and so could not be diagnosed. But in the meantime, he insisted on scoping my throat thoroughly, which means running the cable through my sinuses via both nostrils in succession. When he finally snaked the wire out for the last time, he turned the computer around and said “OK, here’s what I’m lookin’ at. There’s a sort of a bleeding sore on your palate, but that doesn’t seem like it would have precipitated a deciliter of gore, so you should probably assume you got a sinus infection and take those antibiotics. But do you see this mass here in your throat? That’s new. And disturbing.”
Indeed. There is a bright and shiny new growth in my throat, which looks really, really ugly. Rather resembles a fungal skin infection we used to get as kids called impetigo, which manifested as swollen mountains of tissue with raw bloody spots and scabs on them. Icky.
So, mid-January, I gotta go back in to the hospital for anesthesia and diagnostic biopsy surgery. In the interim, of course, I need a full suite of blood assays and an EKG, required (I presume) as pre-op prep by either the anesthesiologist’s or the surgeon’s insurance company.
Thus the “#$%^&*()(*&^%” email. If this sucker is malignant and I have to be treated again, I’m gonna be pretty well pissed off. At nobody and nothing in particular, of course. And we’ve already established that the Universe Don’t Give A Rat’s Ass.
Maybe it’s benign. I’ll dedicate this round of diagnostics to the poor alcoholic woman who used to live next door to my parents at the cottage in Pompton Lakes. If nothing else, I’m sure she would appreciate the Xanax prescription!
It’s Christmas Eve Eve, my friends, and we’re all still here, despite Mayan prophecy and internet paranoia. I’m just glad to be here. Really, really glad to be here. Gonna make the family ravioli recipe, a boned (as in de-boned) and stuffed turkey, and shrimp and smoked fish for Christmas Eve supper. Going to finish the four gospels and Revelation, and watch the Pope totter through Christmas Eve services from Rome. Most of all, I’m going to bask in the fact of life itself. Under easily imaginable circumstances, in most of the alternate realities out there in the multiverse, I’m not here to feel the love. But in THIS universe, I am. I love you all. I’ll probably get a fresh essay up at http://www.aehsfoundation.org/ later in the week, and some recipes and photos up at http://docviper.livejournal.com/ after Christmas. Have a good holiday, everyone. This might be a good time to reflect, whether you’re a believer or not, on the prospect that the God of Christianity, Judaism, and Islam is the SAME FRICKIN’ GOD. Which, of course, means that the ongoing violence done in his/her/its name (I kind of like Alanis Morisette’s portrayal in Dogma) is OUR problem to solve.
Every year around this time, for just a few days, I feel like maybe we’re up to it. Wish I could capture that feeling year round. Love you all. Ma Salaama!
Led Zeppelin apparently did not borrow the lyrics for “Good Times, Bad Times” from earlier blues artists. I note this only because they did routinely did do so, sometimes (and sometimes not) crediting their elders. I bring it up here because if there’s one thing cancer (and its aftermath) teaches is that there are good times and bad times and you got to handle both.
Let’s start with this week’s “good”. I got to do some experimental voice therapy. I traveled the prior week, successfully giving a presentation to a large room of people and some on the telecon line. Score one for my diction. I gave public credit to my daily recitation of learning tapes of conversational Arabic as my Demosthenes’ pebbles. Of course Demosthenes did a whole lot more for his rhetorical skills than learn to speak through a faceful of rocks. He practiced speaking while sprinting up hills, he talked through and over horrific storms, he cut his hair in silly ways so he’d be too embarrassed to go to town and then spent the months it took his hair to grow back speaking constantly in the wilderness (a nicely descriptive, if unacademic, depiction of Demosthenes’ hard work on his public speaking skills is http://www.mainlesson.com/display.php?author=tappan&book=oldworld&story=demosthenes ).
Anyway, this week I had to road test several drafts of the Holidays driving CD. So, for the first half of the week, I skipped my Arabic. My vocal skills declined perceptibly. Later in the week, I went back to an hour a day (half hour each way) of loud, careful pronunciation of difficult Arabic phrases. Voice got a lot better. Clearly, working on conversational Arabic is therapeutic for the cancer-and-radiation impaired vocal apparatus. Got to let my speech therapist know about this.
Now to the week’s bad. My vocal skills actually peaked out late on Friday. By Saturday morning, I noticed a thick sort of mucous running along the top of my mouth—an unusual location. Generally, now there’s no moisture up there at all. Then Saturday night I was expectorating big blobs of…well, we probably don’t want to go there. Suffice it to say that I’m pretty sure I have some kind of infection in my palate. Soft or hard, I’m not sure, but between the pain, the goop, and the dysfunctional diction, I’m pretty certain there’s microbial mischief going on.
Perhaps a little unexpected at this point. After all, the post-radiation physiology, with the depressed white blood cell production, is something of a best-of-all-bacterial worlds. As I know from my jaw bone infection (still have the chunk of jaw that broke off in a vial on my shelf). But this long after, it’s probably more a matter of oral hygiene. I find it difficult to clear the roof of my mouth in the evening, it takes a few minutes of intense work. I’m guessing I need to do that more than once a day to be really safe. But the process itself is somewhat noisy and fairly disgusting. Not the kind of thing I can do in our compact offices with the lightly constructed walls.
Ahh, well. I’ll go see my GP this week and see what he thinks. I have a couple sets of antibiotic prescriptions stashed away from last year as well. One way or another, I’ll get through it. Goopy as it may be.
Been changed by cancer? Oh yeah, I have indeed. I’m more quietly satisfied, vs. verbally euphoric, at the good times. And I’m much, much more calm and stoic in the face of the bad ones.
And that awesome drum riff from “Good Times, Bad Times”? Apparently Bonham learned to play both the 16th note bass triplets and the steady high hat with a single kick drum. Because he didn’t realize that Carmine Appice, who’s beat it was, actually played it with a double bass.
Rock on, everyone. I’ll give you the medical update next week. Sustainability news and views at http://www.aehsfoundation.org/ and http://sustainablebiospheredotnet.blogspot.com/ . I haven’t had a chance to update more Young Adult Dystrophy reviews at http://theresaturtleinmysoup.blogspot.com/ . Or the natural history and photos at http://docviper.livejournal.com/ . Maybe over the next few holiday weeks I’ll get the weblog empire updating out of phase, and I’ll just announce site-by-site when and where there’s new material up. Hopefully the antibiotics will help with that. Have a great week, everybody!
