Month: July 2020

58 Seventy-three Years At It, Birds, and Bees.

~ Roger JG Albert ~ 3 Comments

So, I’m sitting on the deck overlooking the fountain that Tilly has fallen in love with, and I can see the bees working the St-John’s Wort, flower after flower. I tried to capture of video of bees and flowers, but so far it just hasn’t worked. In any case, I swear I’m telling the truth (bees swarm those flowers!) so don’t press me for visual proof although I have posted a picture of the St-John’s Wort above the fountain. Spot the bee!

St-John’s Wort

Hummingbirds are into the honeysuckle to the right of this picture, making regular trips here from the feeder in the front of the house. We have huge huckleberry bushes close by which we usually save for the robins and for my brother Léo when he often comes to visit with his family in the summer. But this year who knows where the robins are and Léo is safely distancing in Maple Ridge. Someone will probably write a book: Romance in the Time of Covid or maybe, Covid-19: Mess up our world will you?

The weather is getting warmer and the reclining chairs we have on the deck are very comfy. Sleep comes easily unless I’m on one of my dex days. Two and a half more chemo cycles. Must make it through. I’m trusting that I won’t be in a wheelchair after my first chemo course is over in October, but who knows, oncologists are not known for committing themselves to a particular prognostication. Oh well. Such is life.

Winding down. Sometimes I lay awake at night, especially on those nights when I’m on a dexamethasone high. Wakeful periods at night are a new things for me. I never had trouble sleeping, not even during really stressful periods in our lives. Now, at least three nights a week I have a hard time falling asleep or staying asleep.

At these times, all kinds of thoughts come into my head. They’re not all bad thoughts. I sometimes go over plans I have for a project I’m working on or I’ll muse on the news of the day. Sometimes wakeful periods can be quite productive. I promised myself years ago that when I got old I wouldn’t be one of those people who lived in the past reliving regretful events or sad moments in my life. Oh, that happens on occasion, but then I catch myself doing it and move on. Inevitably, these days, my mind wanders into the wall of truth that is my seventy-three years of life. Seventy-three years can seem like a long time, but it’s just a flash, really.

In a previous post I wrote:

As Brian Cox, the famous British physicist put it, the universe itself lives and dies in a moment. Individual organisms come and go in an instant. The passage of time is an illusion that allows us to cope with the need to die. One human life lived over a period of eighty years is no more fleeting than the life of the universe itself. 

Cox could have said “One human life lived over a period of eighty years is just as fleeting as the life of the universe itself,” because it is SO fleeting. Lately I’ve been musing about the lives of my parents and of their parents. My parents lived fairly long lives by most standards, both into their nineties, but they’re both gone and now their lives are a complete thing. It’s possible to trace their lives from beginning to end, to focus on the things they did, the children they had, the jobs they had and the way they related to us kids and their friends and relatives. There are photos and some film that my father took with his Super 8 movie camera. Everything they were and did is packaged up and we call that their lives. The finitude of a past life is obvious. It has a beginning and an end.

In our own lives we look back on past events, camping trips, weddings, stressful situations at work, strained relationships, special bonds we create with like minded people and with community. We look forward to and anticipate events, meetings, occasions, going to bed or working on a project. Time never stops for us until we fill that space we call life. At the time of our death, our life space is complete. A life is not complete until death, no matter when death comes.

Yet we are like mushrooms.

We are products of a cultural, social, and physical mycelium that has existence over time. We are much like mushrooms that sprout from a mycelium that has existed underground for some time and will exist long after the mushrooms that it produced slowly melt away back into the soil. Like mushrooms, humans flower for a short time, then decay returning to the soil of our ancestors. We are expressions of a process. Yet, no matter how elegant and truthful this metaphorical explanation may be for our lives, it does not satisfy.

No matter how hard I try to intellectualize the problem of time, life and death, I can’t help but get choked up a bit when I think that I’m on my last legs, that my death is immanent. It’s still a bit of a shock to me to think that I have incurable cancer. No way of getting out of this one. One day soon(ish) I will die. Am I prepared for that day? Not really. I want to think that when the time comes I will courageously and stoically meet my fate, but I may just beg for more morphine. Who know? However I spend my last moments of consciousness, nothing will change the outcome.

Yes, there’s currently a lot of research being done on a cure for multiple myeloma but like AIDS, it’s cure is elusive. There are treatments for myeloma that make it more like a chronic disease than an immediately fatal one, but still, the writing is on the wall, as the saying goes. Besides, myeloma or not, my death is inevitable, as is yours because that is the way it is. Life and death dance together. Learning the final dance may be the toughest thing I ever do.

Addendum

A minute ago I mindlessly killed a mosquito. It’s an automatic reaction. A Jain would be very displeased with me. Janism is an ancient Indian religion. “Jains believe that animals, plants, humans (irrespective of different spiritual development) all have a living soul in them and all should be treated with equal respect and love.” (From the website)

Shit. Well, I guess I’m no Jain.

How mindlessly we treat most life, and how quickly life comes and goes.

56 Confessions (and the weather)

~ Roger JG Albert ~ 9 Comments

The weather has been so unpredictable lately. The meteorologists at the Weather Office must be gnawing their fingernails off. It’s been great for the garden overall except now it would be good to have more heat and sun to ripen the berries. We’re eating a lot from the garden now. Cucumbers, lettuce (so much lettuce), tomatoes, zucchini, broccoli, cauliflower, kohlrabi, and lots more. I fell kind of bad that we can’t support the farmer’s markets, but no. We can’t do that. Of course the farmer’s markets have way more than just veggies and fruit, but then there are other reasons I don’t go to places where people gather, at least not regularly and not willingly.

We sat on the porch today looking over the front of the property and off toward the village. The clouds came through at different elevations, the higher ones travelling west to east and the lower ones southeast to northwest. It was sunny at intervals. It rained a bit. It was around 20˚C most of the day. Not at all unpleasant. Tilly was her usual goofy self entertaining us with her antics on the patio. She really is a laugh a minute, that is, when she’s not biting us. Sometimes she just wanders over and sits at the top of the driveway surveying the yard below. I’d love to know what kind of puppy thoughts are going through her head.

As usual for a Thursday I took my chemo oral drugs on the early morning then went to the hospital for my Bortezomib shot at 10:30. When I went in, there was just a short wait for the lab (not that I was going there), but when I came out, there was a lineup outside going almost around the building, probably thirty people, some in wheelchairs, some with walkers waiting for clearance to even step into the hospital. Some were going to the lab (for a long wait) but others were going for imaging or to the Bone people, or wherever. You stand in line whether you have an appointment or not.

Everybody gets the standard Covid-19 song and dance: Have you travelled out of the country in the last 14 days? Have you been in proximity of someone who has tested positive for Covid-19? Do you have a fever, cough? Etcetera? I usually stack up the nos at the very beginning of the process and that usually works but not today. Today I got the full meal deal. Everybody was getting it. No wonder the lineup is so long. Of course it has to be done. I’m really not complaining. The Covid-19 protocols these days appear to be just as unpredictable as the weather. Oh well, we carry on.

Just as unpredictable as the weather is how my body is going to react to my chemo drugs. It’s been a nasty ride lately with Bortezomib creating havoc with my nervous system, making my skin on my legs and torso very sensitive to painful to the touch. Added to the pain is a weakness in my legs that is now making it very difficult to move in ways I always previously took for granted, like tying my shoes or picking something off the floor. That’s very distressing. I must confess that I’ve had moments when I have felt pretty sorry for myself. Fuck cancer!

Now I’m on a very low dose of amitriptyline, a drug that was developed for depression (at 100 mg/dose) but was also discovered to help with pain at a dose of 10mg, the dose that I’m on. It has side effects, like they all do. Pile side effects on top of side effects. What drug is doing what is anybody’s guess. The pain in my legs and back is so distracting, and along with the usual dizziness I experience all the time, I get a pretty constant brain fog. I can still put together a coherent thought, but I have some difficulty communicating those thoughts sometimes. Not always. My brain is like the weather right now. Some coherent thinking. Some stoned time. Some sleepiness. Not always in the right order. Unpredictable is what it is.

The fact that I can even write this is due to some momentary clarity induced by another of my drugs, dexamethasone. It won’t last long, so I had better hurry and get this done. I’m really wondering right now about this whole business of oncology. Like, how is it that a drug can be approved to treat a condition, in my case, cancer, yet produce side effects that are debilitating, potentially for the long term? What’s the goal here?

It’s pretty obvious after reading The Emperor of all Maladies by Siddhartha Mukherjee (2010) (a book review here), that the objective of oncology, both clinical and research is to prolong life. Many people have died because of the effects of chemotherapy. As far as drug trials go the Golden Chalice is survivability. If they get 5 months more survivability with a drug that’s considered a successful trial. Since Mukherjee wrote his book, lots of progress has been made and lots of animals have been sacrificed to the cause, but they still can’t engineer Bortezomib to do good work and to avoid beating the crap out patients just in order to keep them alive. Of course, the instinct of self-preservation is strong in most of us to the point where we are more often than not willing to sacrifice a lot just to get more life out of the deal.

My chemotherapy is really working well as far as the myeloma is concerned, but at what cost? It’s a straightforward cost/benefit analysis and I’m working on that right now. I have a strong will to live, and I’ve seen people in a lot worse shape than I’m on stick it out and squeeze the last bit of life out of their decaying bodies that they can. So far I guess my actions have betrayed my values as is the case for most of us most of the time. More on this in my next post.