It Might Get Messy
Actually, at this point there is no doubt remaining. It IS going to get messy. In fact, it’s beginning already. But before I override my whine-prevention chip, let’s start 50 years ago or so.
My Mom’s best friend was staying over one night at the cottage in Pompton Lakes. Given that it WAS an actual, tiny cottage, the poor woman was relegated to the couch in the living room. Which was the same room as the television set, just around the dining room corner from the kitchen. To this day, Ms. BJG (as we’ll call her) recalls awakening to what she has since described as “the most disgusting smell I’ve ever had to put up with.” Mind you, Ms. BJG had spent considerable time living in the Philippines, where every second or third smell fits easily into the “disgusting” category. But it turns out, my sister and I were parked on the living room rug, watching Rocky and Bullwinkle and eating cans of Campbell’s Cream of Chicken Soup straight out of the can—cold and with no dilution. That concentrated canned soup aroma was more than Ms. BJG could handle.
Actually, cold cream of chicken soup was one of my favorite quick snacks when I was a kid. For a real treat, I’d smear a can over a hot omelet, which made an actually delicious lunch. I passed my taste for cold canned soup on to my sister. Pushing Ms. BJG past her tolerance limits.
I bring this up because the taste and smell of my now radiation-cooked tumor region now tastes precisely like Campbell’s Cream of Chicken Soup, cold and undiluted, with a heavy sprinkling of onion salt straight out of the pantry. Now that I’m trapped with the smell, I find it unbearably disgusting. What goes around comes around, if you’ll permit me the cliché!
But that’s not why things are getting messy. They are getting messy because a) the radiation treatments are starting to kick in. Doctor N says he can see radiation burns at the tumor site. I know I can FEEL radiation burns all through the right side of my face and especially on my palate where the tumor is. Also, the radiation is sapping my strength. Some days it is all I can do to break my day-long sleep enough to try to get my calorie ration and get awake enough to take my second (afternoon) treatment. And the problem with the energy drain from the radiation is that sleep, while feeling absolutely impossible to resist, doesn’t really help. I’m just as exhausted when I I’m awake as when I’m napping.
The hospital has helped me out with this problem. They’ve moved me into an actual private office all my own, with a door that closes! See photo below.
Last week I worked hard editing a major book manuscript and getting some work done on our urban ecosystems book. So the office was very helpful. When I was awake. Still, it’s a nice gesture by the hospital to help me keep working while my physiology is taking a beating.
They’ve also initiated my chemotherapeutic infusions. On Tuesday, via freehand IV, I got my first treatment. The active ingredients of the chemo infusion for this round are two. One is Carboplatin, whose side effects include immunosuppression, anemia, fever, “very bad belly pain”, trouble breathing, loose stools, spontaneous bruising and bleeding, weakness and tiredness, nausea and vomiting, skin irritation, hair loss, and potential for serious anaphylaxis, among others. Attempting to get around these contretemps, the IV cocktail includes a long list of substances designed to suppress the ill effects of the drug. One of which is a high-powered steroid that thankfully hits my physiology like an IV of high-powered opiates. Almost makes the 3 hour chemo session worthwhile!
Did I mention they want to do MORE surgery on me this week? The medical port in my shoulder is nonfunctional, they want to remove and replace it to avoid freehanding my IVs. So this week is logistical hell. I gotta drive to GBMC to get my morning radiation, drive back to my GP for pre-op, go back to GBMC for evening radiation and to get blood drawn, next day I go in for surgery between radiation doses. I expect I’ll be quite the mess.
Really, the most annoying thing at this point is the production of really thick, sticky mucous in my sinuses and throat. I can cough some of it up, some of it needs to be blown out when it builds to a large volume. If I tip too much the wrong way when I sleep, I feel like I’m drowning. Actually, I probably AM drowning.
Anyway. The other chemo drug is Paclitaxel. Side effects are bone marrow degradation, fever, anemia, vomiting, mouth and lip irritation (my lips are like shredded tissue at this point), hair loss, numbness, muscle and joint pain, and inability to get pregnant.
Clutching at straws, I’ll go with that last side effect as a good sign. And hope they keep piling that steroid into the cocktail to suppress the rest of the list.
OK, sports fans. That’s it for this week, all. I am just too sick to do any more beyond this flagship column. I'm going to leave the rest of the weblog empire right where it is for this week, and get caught up on it during the week and ready for next weekend. So hold off a week before you check on the cycle of http://docviper.livejournal.com/ , http://theresaturtleinmysoup.blogspot.com/ , http://sustainablebiospheredotnet.blogspot.com/ , http://aehsfoundation.org/ (go to the lower left on the home page and click through to the blog), and don’t forget to check DAC Crossley’s wild west blog.
I am also behind on emails. I’ll make that my special target this week, to get emails out to all. Special shout-outs must go to Ms T in rural Alabama for the FANTASTIC gift package. Not only stuff to entertain me, but I am called out by name in her church’s prayer rounds. Given what a delightful person she is, and how much she cares, it may be that she can single-handedly (along with her church compatriots) help me find the road to recovery from the branching paths that lead to oblivion. Thanks again and love to everyone!!
It Might Get Messy
War between Greece and Persia began in the mid-500s BC when Cyrus I of Persia captured Greek cities in Ionia, on what his now the Turkish coast. Over the next 50 years, Ionia revolted several times, with support from Athens. By 494 BC, revolts were suppressed by Darius I operating both at sea and on land. Despite the successful outcome, Darius was thoroughly pissed off at Greece, especially Athens, for supporting Ionia.
In 490 BC, Darius expressed his dissatisfaction with the Greeks by invading the mainland, specifically heading for Athens. At the Battle of Marathon, an alliance of Greek city states defeated the Persian expeditionary forces, as announced by Pheidippides right before he dropped dead from exhaustion after running the 26 miles from Marathon to Athens.
Darius passed his affection for the Greeks along to his son Xerxes. Xerxes tried again to invade Greece, this time with a massive army of hundreds of thousands of troops and a large navy. Delayed at Thermopylae by another Greek alliance, Xerxes broke through after three days of intense battles with Spartans under Leonidas. The time lag was sufficient for the Greek navy to hammer the Persian fleet. Xerxes made it to Athens, but was thoroughly defeated at Plataea. Having tried three times to conquer Greek city states, the Persians gave it up and never again threatened Greece in any meaningful way.
And why am I subjecting you to this ridiculous historical abstract? Because there are layers and layers of lessons here for those battling cancer. Basically, cancer victims are a defensive crowd, putting us in the place of the Greeks over centuries of war with Persia. First thing to learn is that just showing up is important. After all, if 300 Spartans and a backing force of several hundred Phocians, Locrians, and Lesbians (the latter from the island city state of Lesbos, no reference to sexual orientation) hadn’t shown up, the combined Persian army and navy would have had free access to the Greek Peninsula and a straight shot at Athens.
Second lesson is: once you show up, fight like hell. Military operations have options for retreat and regrouping, cancer victims have no such viable alternatives. Best analogy here is with the Spartan expeditionary force. They knew fighting to the death was what was needed, and they did what had to be done. Cancer treatment is complicated, scary, and painful. Like having your own little Thermopylae Road in your physiology. You’re going to die anyway, you might as well die fighting.
There are other lessons we could glean from the history of the Greco-Persian wars, but this column is a cancer diary update, not a historical ramble. Well, not a ramble beyond those paragraphs above, anyway. Here’s this week’s report from CancerLand.
Monday they bolted me down under the radiation generators and attempted to align my malignancy with the radiobeams. Took almost an hour of frustration by the technicians and nurses. Finally we worked it out so that when I’m strapped in for real, it’s my responsibility to “relax your shoulders down, tilt your head back into the table, push the left side of your head hard against the mesh, and raise your chin to cram up against the mesh”. Oy. Being bolted down in a cage like Winston Smith waiting for the rats to be released is stressful enough without having to remember to squash my face into the mesh at the proper moment.
Radiation treatments started Tuesday, and then went to two-a-days (0830 hrs and 1500 hrs). Between treatments, the hospital is kind enough to let me use a corner of the waiting area as my office (photo below).
Anyway, on Thursday, the chemotherapy staff discovered that they couldn’t access the medical port that was inserted into my chest a couple years ago. So they sent me to another department—“Interventional Radiology”. Sounds like something out of 1984, maybe the sign on a single door in a long, dark hallway as they drag Winston Smith in for his “treatments”. IR tried mightily to access the port. After 30 or 40 minutes of hammering, they discovered via injection that the port is physically broken—stuff injected simply leaks out into my chest cavity rather than feeding into my circulatory system.
This means my chemo infusions will be done via freehand IV. The drugs they’re proposing are nasty, but you’ll have to wait until next week for a drug briefing (I sound like some marginally competent field agent for the DEA working a remote border road say between North Dakota and the middle of nowhere Canada). Because this week, the radiation already has already taken discernible hold on my physiology. The right hand side of my face is showing signs of radiation burns. And I’ve been barfing a couple times a day, despite eating low volumes of benign liquid medical “food” via my GIT tube. They gave me a scrip for enormous amounts of liquid Ondantsetron and a scopolamine skin patch to try to quell the vomiting. Once they start the chemotherapy (next Tuesday), part of the infusion brew is even more massively powerful anti-vomiting drugs. Hopefully despite the beating the rest of my body is taking, chronic vomiting won’t be part of the repertoire going forward.
Anyway. With the fussy positioning I have to do to keep my tumor in the radiobeams, I wonder what tissues are ACTUALLY being cooked. Oh yeah, one more thing. Despite my missing tongue, I can smell and taste the tumors as they deep-fat-fry. It’s a cooked-meat flavor, with a dash of really gruesome Limburger cheese and a whiff of rotten fruit. Yum. Hopefully I’m smelling “tumor” and not just some fleshy part of my mouth cavity!
New stuff around the weblog horn this week. Starting Sunday night, check out http://docviper.livejournal.com/ (which, in addition to pre-publishing the next chapter in the urban ecosystems book, has cool photos of fish in the hospital aquarium and some plants from the hospital grounds), http://theresaturtleinmysoup.blogspot.com/ , http://sustainablebiospheredotnet.blogspot.com/ , professional blog at http://www.aehsfoundation.org/ (go to lower left on the home page and click through to the blog) and DAC Crossley’s wild west blog at http://daccrossley.typepad.com/ .
Thanks for being here, everybody. Once again, it’s important for me to tell you that knowing you all are out there in the world rooting for me makes me much stronger and better at fighting the cancer and its painful and difficult treatment. Love to everyone, let anybody who inquires know how I’m doing and send ‘em to this blog. Talk to you next week!
Ever go into a tourist shop in D.C., maybe one of those in Adams Morgan where authentic foreign antiques and trinkets mix with fakes made everywhere from Hong Kong to Hackensack? What’s the first thing you see in front of the store? Of course, it’s Matryoshka dolls, traditional Russian nesting wooden carvings that start with a large mother doll, with smaller and smaller dolls inside. Actually according to Wikipedia the “tradition” goes back to 1890, when the first set was carved anticipating an international exhibition in the early 1900s.
Still, even a century old “tradition” can be an effective metaphor. As in, every time I go near a hospital, somebody peels away another layer of doll and finds a hidden medical problem. First there was the trip to Baltimore to close out the surgery by removing the last few dozen staples. At that point they found a blood clot in my lungs with potential to generate a heart attack, and put me on so much blood thinner that a few days later I started to bleed like a second-rate bull in a small-town Andalucian fighting ring. Out of the hospital from that, and they stuff me into a very tight, dark claustrophobia-inducing MRI tube to locate the best way to irradiate the known tumor on my palate. At the same time, they find something the radiologist thinks is “suspicious”. So then they send me back to the hospital where a guy with an ultrasound unit and a microscalpel slices up the raisin-looking “suspicious” item, vacuums its little pieces onto microscope slides, and sends it in for analysis. Which comes back “non-malignant”. Great news, no? A possible cancer that’s not cancerous! Yeah!!
Except, it turns out the raisiny spot isn’t totally clear. According to the radiation oncologist, the cells are “reproducing funny”. He says “funny” means definitely abnormal but also definitely not malignant. I assume he doesn’t mean funny haha. And what whatever he means, the hilarity is not going to interfere with the treatment plan the docs are cooking up as we speak.
We’ve already made the form they use to bolt me to the table so the radiation burns are confined to the desired tissues. Which, I remind you, doesn’t mean they don’t hurt. In fact, the radiation burns hurt like hell, in a stinging, constantly painful way. Anyway, the next thing to do is figure out rad dosage, number of applications per day, what chemotherapeutic drugs to use and how often, shit like that.
Radiation is now scheduled to begin 14 May at 1400 hrs. The doctors say they “hope” the plan will be “ready” by then. There are only three of them, I’m not sure how long it can take them to cook up a plan to…uh…cook up my tumor. But that’s where we are. There may be more layers of matryoshka dolls to peel away in the interim, but at the moment they’re thinking we’ll be ready to go by mid-May.
At that point, you’ll REALLY start getting the whiny weblogs. For the moment, there will be material around the weblog horn by Sunday evening. See important stuff at http://aehsfoundation.org/ (go to lower left on home page and click through to blog), http://docviper.livejournal.com/ , http://www.theresaturtleinmysoup.blogspot.com/ , and http://www.sustainablebiospheredotnet.blogspot.com/ . Also, see DAC Crossley’s wild west weblog at http://daccrossley.typepad.com/. DAC was my major professor at UGA, and is one of the liveliest and funniest people you’ll ever meet. He’s also gone one better than the rest of us—he’s written and published novels. Dammit. I gotta get my ass in gear… .
It Might Get Messy
There are two dichotomous approaches to engineering design: “fail safe” and “safe fail”. “Fail safe” devices are intended to never fail—to be “safe” from failure. The classic example, of course, was nuclear weapons systems during the Cold War. The odd doctrine of “Mutual Assured Destruction”, coupled with use codes that were essentially impossible to bypass proved, in retrospect, to be fail safe. Of course, the idea of fail safe is that the alternative—failure of the system—would be so gruesome that the entire complex of physical and social parameters that make up the system were devoted to non-failure.
At this point, all of you should be picturing Slim Pickens in Dr. Strangelove, riding earthward over central Russia on the single warhead that managed to penetrate the fail safe bulkheads. Note that the Washington Post this week, in an otherwise exemplary story on public health, stated that “social isolation increased the likelihood of death among the elderly by a stunning 26 percent”, implying, it seems to me, that social interaction renders humans “fail safe” from death. Hmmm, I said to myself. Clearly I need to figure out how to join that remaining 74% who apparently don’t die even if they DON’T have “social interaction”.
Reality, of course, must as always rear its ugly head. Humans are a “safe fail” system, designed via evolution to survive many engineering insults up to the approximate level of being hit by a Peterbilt semi on a high-speed roadway.
One problem with being an enormously complex safe fail system is in the number of non-lethal things that go wrong. What keeps the system safe fail is that these less-than-catastrophic contretemps are repaired before they reach the total failure threshold.
And why am I subjecting you to this rambling discourse on the philosophy of risk management? Because every time the doctors think they have a grip on my physiological problems (and therefore necessary treatment planning), something unexpected pops up. Last week I showed you a photo of the enormous hematoma draining from my thigh. While I was stuffed into the claustrophobia tube test getting my MRI to delineate the known tumor, a shriveled, ugly-looking lymph node showed up. Given that I’m not supposed to have lymph nodes in my neck any more, having one growing to visible size is intensely disturbing. Monday I head for the hospital to have this raisinous lymph node biopsied in case it needs to be factored into the treatment plan.
Meantime, the MRI yielded some interesting pix of my throat. I’m not precisely sure where the tumor-of-concern actually is, and I won’t have a chance to ask the doctors until later in the week. However, if you will examine the following MRI images and look along the curved inner edge of my oral cavity (the back side of the dark hole niftily labeled "A" for "anterior"), you can see what looks like a coating of light-colored, slightly swollen tissue running along that edge. I think that might be the tumor.
It’s diffuse, and weak, and at the moment looking less than vigorous. The idea of starting radiation and chemotherapy treatments immediately is to catch the malignancy while it remains in a weakened, incoherent condition. Hitting it hard while its down maximizes the opportunity for successful treatment.
Unless, of course, there’s another failure point hiding elsewhere in the system. Like a dried-raisin lymph node, rising from the dead to threaten to spread the cancer throughout my body. At that point, the image of the Peterbilt on the highway, or of Slim Pickens riding the bomb, take on a whole new level of reality. A level I don’t like.
Anyway, this week in addition to this cancer blog, there’s my professional piece at http://www.aehsfoundation.org/ (lower left on the home page to click through to the blog) which is reprinted for your convenience at http://www.sustainablebiospheredotnet.blogspot.com/ . The next draft chapter in the urban ecosystems book—8th street, I believe—is up at http://docviper.livejournal.com/ . Some brief music commentary—regarding the Be Good Tanyas—is at http://theresaturtleinmysoup.blogspot.com/ . Have a good week, everybody. I’ll be in and out of hospital, having various tests and getting ready to have my ass kicked by the radiation once again. And finding out if the radiation can be confined to the edge of my palate, or if it has to be expanded to include a treasonous lymph node elsewhere in my neck.
It Might Get Messy
Our high school football center…let’s call him “Reg”, since that’s his actual name…had knee trouble one season. He developed this huge, basketball-sized hematoma over his right knee, a big, blobby sack full of body fluids. No other real problems—his knee was structurally sound and pain-free. He just got this big bag o’ goop over it periodically. To prep him for games, some of us took to getting to the field house early on Saturdays to help stick the needles Doc K gave us into the hematoma and squeeze the bucket of blood out before we taped everything up for the game.
Per the title, things here in CancerLand are indeed messy. Again. The photo below
shows the enormous volume of lymphatic fluid being drained from the reservoir in my leg where they harvested the abortive tongue-replacement muscle. They could install a permanent drain, which I would have to empty several times a day. Or, we can just let it build up to this couple-of-liters level and empty it whenever I go see Dr. H. Which is where we’re goin’ now.
At the moment, that’s the least of my problems. After letting the available information sink in, and listening to the Be Good Tanyas sing “Waitin’ Around to Die” a couple dozen times, I have opted to put myself back into the ovens and go for the full course of radiation and chemotherapy. Once I cut the doctors loose, they were like a pack of hungry huskies waiting for the washtub of frozen herring to be thrown out the back door of the yurt. Wednesday I let Dr. H know I was ready to face the fire. Today they stuck me in a CT scanner, heated up a full-size mesh head-and-torso blank, laid me down, and bolted me to the table while the hot mesh roasted my skin and cooled into my shape. I prevented myself from having a screaming claustrophobia incident by remembering that on Monday I have to face a full size/full time MRI. That’s the one where they stick you in a powerfully magnetic test tube and monitor density differences at a millimeter scale from head to torso. It is almost the definition of claustrophobia.
I forgot how terrifying this entire experience was last time. And how dangerous. Dr N enumerated potential downside effects, reminding me that jugular veins are at risk (last time they cooked my left jugular, had to restore it surgically with massive loss of blood), and that my spine is in the line of fire. It doesn’t take much radiation to burn the spinal cord itself beyond physiological effectiveness.
And it goes on from there. And of course you have to add the weekly chemotherapy infusion to the twice-daily radiation burn when summing the grim and painful downsides. Damn, those radiation burns sting like a son-of-a-bitch once they form, and they take forever to subside. In fact, in some cases they may never subside.
So ok, the upshot for this week is that I am about to go back into the deep, deep shit, hoping for that tradeoff kicking a now weakened and diffuse tumor while it’s down and running for the 30% potential for full recovery. The doctors are confident. I am terrified. The radiation is what it is—a dangerous but potentially miraculous tool in the hands of experienced tradespeople.
If nothing else, I should at least have mildly humorous blog entries for the foreseeable future. These treatments are going to go on for a while. Meantime, remember to surf on over to http://www.aehsfoundation.org/ for the professional blog on sustainability, and its weblog empire companion http://sustainablebiospheredotnet.blogspot.com/ . At http://docviper.livejournal.com/ there’s a short draft of chapter 7—7th Street—of the urban ecosystems book. No new material up at there’s a turtle in my soup. Expect the entire weblog empire to start to fill up now that spring is here, though!
Love you all, my friends. Apologies for putting you through the whining of another round of radiation treatment. But that’s where we’re going. I’ll be thinking of you as they apply the radiation beams, and hoping they’re getting them into the correct tissues!
Question: how is the U.S. Civil War like cancer? Answer: Stonewall Jackson. Consider.
Information is important. Really important. Good decisions don’t get made without good information. You can’t fight effectively in a clichéd “Fog of War”. And nobody illustrates this with more comic panache than Thomas J. “Stonewall” Jackson, former VMI professor turned fire-and-brimstone preacher who believed that Satan himself led the Yankee cause.
Jackson got his nickname at First Manassas. As the confederate lines broke around his position, he stood at the head of his unit and gave the retreating men a rallying point. It was noted by cynics that he might have been standing like a “stone wall” out of dim sluggishness, but the legend lives otherwise. Over the next two years (give or take a couple zone-outs when he acted more sluggish than courageous) he became one of Lee’s most important and effective generals. Then at Chancellorsville, Virginia in 1863, Jackson and some of his officers rode ahead of their own lines chasing the damned (literally, he believed) Yankees, and he was shot by his own sentries on his return in the gathering darkness.
Even in this abbreviated version, it’s clear there were way too many people taking too many actions on the basis of too little or too lousy information.
I bring this up because I met with Dr. T today. Her read of the same scan I gave you a still from last entry (that scratchy, “non-tumorish”-looking chunk of my throat) is that possibly the tumor material itself, and certainly its malignancy, has shrunk since the prior scan. Doc T takes this as good information from which to conclude that radiation has a better chance of success than we believed just a few weeks ago. Acknowledging the nightmare side effects, Dr. T thinks the risk balance may have swung across the abyss to the “active treatment” side of the wheel.
Not wanting to fall into that trap of under-interpreting available information or not seeing important interstices, we asked Dr. T to confer with Drs. H and N and give us some recommendations and thoughts. At least at that point we’ll have a basis to talk, and a basis that is the first hint of optimism in this case for a long time.
We’ll see. There’s a tendency to see optimistic information as more reliable (for obvious but faulty reasons) than pessimistic. So I’m not jacking my hope-o-meter too high on the basis of this conversation. But I’m letting it look over in that direction.
Just in case, I got some extra pain killers to back up the short-term dilaudid with some longer-term morphine patches. At least I’ll have enough meds to keep writing as long as possible!
Remember that over the weekend I’ll update my professional weblog at http://www.aehsfoundation.org/ (go to lower left on home page and click through to sustainability weblog). I give you a second shot at that piece by reprinting it every week at http://sustainablebiospheredotnet.blogspot.com/ . Also, now that spring is here, I want to get more of this weblog empire back in action. Here’s what I’m gonna do. Even BEFORE I went to see Dr T for the positive spin session, I’d test-driven my ability to crank out chapters of the Urban Ecosystems book that went on hold when I was originally diagnosed. Turns out the creative concept—short, to the point chapters of about 1000 word per—is perfect for how I can most effectively write now anyway. I figured if I could live 12 of the 18 outside months they gave me, I could finish that manuscript. Well, I now believe that even more strongly. So, over at http://docviper.livejournal.com/ I’m going to post chapters (no matter how drafty) of the Urban Ecosystems book along with the week’s photos from my rehabilitation hikes in local woodlands and parks. Finally, I’m going to get my artistic ass back in gear at http://www.theresaturtleinmysoup.blogspot.com/ and post literature, music, culture, food and food-related materials. Basically, by this Sunday night (that is, night of 21 April), there will be new material posted around the horn on the weblog empire. If you have the time (or the willpower), check ‘em all out. They’ll be running weekly from now on, if I remain as strong as I seem to be at the moment.
And remember, my friends, everything word I’m able to type out is a testament to your love, friendship, encouragement, and great good humor. Special shout to Dave M. this week for the great guitar letter, with a kicker reminding him that it was me, after a trip to Oahu when I managed to find the best local used CD shop in lieu of the actual conference, who introduced him to Hawaiian Slack Key style guitar. Love you all!
No matter what your southern friends tell you, Sherman’s march through Georgia and then back up the Carolinas and Virginia ended the war much sooner than it would have otherwise (Jefferson Davis was a nut case who would have kept the idiot slaughter going for years), and cut the casualties and costs enormously. Same situation pertains to the use of nuclear weapons at the end of World War Two, but that’s not why we’re here.
We’re here to consider the abortive southern response to Sherman’s devastating vacation through the deep south. Lacking soldiers for home defense, and infrastructure that could be crippled to slow the Union armies, the Confederates turned to land mines. They called them “torpedoes” in those days [1]. They were explosive charges set under pressure plates, so when the Union columns walked over them, the charge detonated and death or destruction resulted. It took Sherman and his officers about an hour and a half to realize that if they marched the southern prisoners of war ahead of the Union troops, the effectiveness of the “torpedoes” would be rendered moot. So it was. Sherman sent word to the southern officers that POWs were the first to go, and the “torpedoes” simply stopped appearing.
I bring this up because causes of death do not have to be obvious to be effective. For example, we usually think of a malignant “tumor” as a kind of blob, an obviously visible, more-or-less egg-shaped, scary-looking growth attached to some part of the body.
Such well-formed tumors are often easily removed surgically. But not all “tumors” look like tumors. My own tumor, for example, or as I like to think of it, my Death Star, is actually just a rough spot on the palate or upper part of my throat. It’s sort of a reddish, inflamed, nasty looking surface on the throat membrane. Here’s what it looks like.
See, it’s just a diffuse, surface-marked, set of lines on the mucous membrane of the throat. No real “tumor” shaped thing. Nothing to go in and remove surgically without hacking out huge additional volumes of tissue in the palate and sinuses, leaving me pretty nonfunctional.
And there you have it, sports fans. A rough spot on my throat has the super incredible power of either of the Star Wars Death Stars. Apparently without the “hit me here and I explode” button that the Empire built into both Death Star versions. No, my friends, this picture tells the story. Sometime within the next year or two, this inflamed spot on my throat is gonna kill me. And there’s not a damn thing that can be done about it. Except this. I intend to cook some of the most delicious meals you ever tasted between now and the date this thing croaks me. So get your taste buds ready, my friends. If I HAD any taste buds, I’d be getting them ready. But don’t worry. I can function without them. I’m gonna cook you guys some of the finest food you’ve had since…well, since the last time I cooked for you! I can’t wait!
PS—note tomorrow I’m going to update my professional weblog at http://www.aehsfoundation.org/ . Go to the lower left on the home page and click through to the blog, or go directly there via http://www.aehsfoundation.org/peoplesystems.aspx
Remember everybody, I’m here for you. Until I’m not here for you. Which will hopefully be further in the future than it seems like it might be at the moment!
[1] Shelby Foote. The Civil War Narrative. Red River to Appomatox. 1974. Random House.
