Month: February 2021

#78. LIFE vs My little life.

~ Roger JG Albert ~ 3 Comments

[I posted this in February, 2021. I’m re-posting because I think it expresses how I’m feeling right now about life and death. I will follow up with another commentary in a couple of days if all goes well.]

LIFE in capital letters is life writ large. It governs all manifestations of individual life. It goes on merrily as individuals live and die generation after generation. Ironically LIFE needs death to make more life. After all, we eat dead things, don’t we? Of course all plants and animals follow the same pattern. They come and go, often by being consumed by other living things. It’s almost March and the property here is getting ready to burst into life after the long period of die-off and dormancy that is winter. Flowers are appearing even with freezing temperatures.

The early ones are aconites, snow drops, early crocuses, and maybe violets. They express life briefly then give way to the grasses, the ferns and the flowers of spring. The pear, apple, plum and cherry trees will soon display their flowers in preparation for the fruit that will follow as long as the pollinators do their thing. The birds are into mating season and we’ll soon have baby robins, finches, nuthatches, flickers, thrushes, jays, hummingbirds, and chickadees hassling their parents, fluttering their wings and demanding food.

The sun is shining right now. It wasn’t supposed to according to the weather forecasters, but there ya go. Living and dying under the sun. That’s what’s going on. My adult life has been informed by the scholarship of life and death, that is, of life and death as considered by philosophers and scientists. The thought of my own dying hasn’t occupied very much of my time except when my mother, father, and sister Denise died, and then only briefly. Being diagnosed with multiple myeloma, a cancer that is incurable but treatable, changed all of that. Myeloma kind of sets the stage for end-of-life considerations. There’s no escaping myeloma’s trajectory. It will kill me eventually if I don’t die of something else first. Now, I have a hard time not thinking about my dying.

For most of my teaching career I used Ernest Becker’s work (The Denial of Death, Escape From Evil) to discuss the role of the fear of death on our cultural institutions. The fear of death and the promise of immortality and their overriding presence in institutions such as patriarchy and misogyny have shaped our social relations and created the conditions necessary for human contest and eventually homicide on a grand scale and war.*Related to our fear of death is our propensity to cut deals with deities. Humans have invented thousands of gods (and related semi-gods or supernatural entities) over the millennia. We assign responsibility to those deities for natural disasters, crop success or failure, floods, earthquakes, volcanoes, and the like. We even put faith in God for winning a football game or a war. We barter with the gods. We make sacrifices. We tell the gods: “Look, we are sacrificing this young woman for you by throwing her into this volcano, now you must reciprocate by ensuring our crops grow well next year.” A life bartered for more life. That’s largely the story of countless religious (and political) invocations over the millennia. Priests and politicians constantly urge us to make sacrifices so that the future will be better.

Modern medicine is an elaborate institution for the denial of death. It’s all about ‘saving’ lives, and it’s willing to go to extreme measures to accomplish that goal. Of course, ‘saving’ a life means little more than postponing a death. Obviously, I’m personally invested in modern medicine and pharmacology. I’m hoping that chemotherapy and radiation treatments will buy me time, effectively giving me more life and postponing my death. Chemotherapy and radiation treatments are not cheap. Just one of the drugs I’m taking will cost over $100,000. One of the pharmacists at the pharmacy in Victoria that dispenses the drugs I use told me over the phone recently that they have some million dollar patients out there, patients that have used these drugs for many years. I attend the Cancer Care Centre at the local hospital and I’m impressed by the technology and the expertise of the many staff nurses and doctors that work in that facility. That can’t be cheap either.

Modern medicine will go to great lengths and expense to treat patients hoping to extend their lives. It must do so otherwise it fails in its sacred mission to safeguard life and battle death, the ultimate enemy. As Becker notes, in our culture death and disease are the twin pillars of evil. Disease prevents us from enjoying the pleasures of life while death cuts them off summarily. So, we are willing to invest a great deal to save an individual life yet we are also willing to gleefully pile corpses in great heaps during war or in the context of ethnic cleansing, that vile excuse for murder, rape, and pillage as in Rwanda, 1994 or in any countless examples of such celebrated mass murders. We gladly kill for US, for our people because THEY(the enemy) are obviously responsible for our misfortune and distress. If we eliminate THEM our problems will be solved. That is the big lie. As Becker notes, we need a THEM with whom to enter into contests to show our prowess and to show our God (gods) how powerful and deserving of eternal life we are. Why do we spend so much time, energy, and money on organized sport? Sports reflect our constant need to show how deserving we are of life and more life. We win, we go to heaven. The gods are obviously on our side. We lose and we face shame and rejection. This analysis can easily be applied to American politics now too.

I’m rambling now. I guess I’m trying to avoid writing about the finitude of my life, my little life. In the face of LIFE and its overarching grip on the process of life and death, my little life doesn’t amount to much…but it’s all I’ve got really. Maybe I can celebrate my insignificance. Maybe I can celebrate the entirety of my life from beginning to end. In a way end is as necessary as beginning in the scheme of things. Let’s see what I can do with the little bit of life I have left.

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*The need for an opponent or an enemy (THEY) is based on our need to prove our worthiness in competition for the good things in life and for eternal life. The winner takes all! Very early on in human history, tribes split in two called moieties so that there would be contestants to beat proving the prowess of the winners and their qualifications for immortality.

#77 I Carry On.

~ Roger JG Albert ~ 6 Comments

#77 Mid-February. Snow blankets the property but thankfully it didn’t fall when I was scheduled for chemotherapy at the hospital. It looks like it is respecting my hospital schedule of appointments. My next appointment for chemo is on the 18th, Thursday. I was successful with my first dose of chemo drugs last week, but there was a glitch in my chemo dates. I developed a fever on February 2nd in the afternoon. My temperature reached 39˚C on the 3rd. One thing we are told over and over again as myeloma patients is to go to the hospital if you develop a fever at all. So, off to the hospital I went. I ended up in the Emergency department for a day or so before they wheeled me up to D3, a ward on the third floor of the hospital. Thankfully I wasn’t there long. My docs tried to figure out what caused the fever, but they weren’t successful. They pumped me full of antibiotics in case of sepsis, a very reasonable thing to do. I developed some cellulitis in my right ankle, but that did not prove to be the source of infection. It may be that the fever was a product of a random myeloma issue. One thing is certain. I do not want to repeat that hospital experience. 

What the Emergency Department interlude produced was a delay in the start of my second round of chemo. Turns out I started with the first full day of infusion on February 11th followed by a slightly shorter day on the 12th. I was supposed to start this course of therapy on February 3rd. 

I’m not sure what to think at the moment. My first dose of daratumumab infused was successful. I had only a slight reaction to it. That’s really good. I hope the rest of the daratumumab infusions go as well. If they do, after having weekly sessions for a couple of months, then bi-weekly ones, I end up with infusions once a month for as long as this cocktail of daratumumab, lenalinomide and dexamethasone works. I’m hoping for a long respite from active myeloma. Of course, as I’ve often repeated, myeloma is incurable, but it is treatable. Given all the challenges I face, I’m determined to make my 80th birthday, that’s six years from now. 

For the time being, my hospital visits for daratumumab infusions regulate my life. It’s really not so bad. The nurses in the Cancer Care facility at the hospital are great and make me as comfortable as possible for my infusions. One thing that may throw a wrench in the works is the very likely possibility that I will need radiation therapy on my jaw. I will have to travel to Victoria for that. I consult on the phone with a radiation oncologist tomorrow morning. I’m not sure what we can accomplish on the phone, but it’s a start. The pain in my jaw is pretty insistent. 

My family is my salvation. Carolyn is amazing and makes sure I get my meds when I need them. I take quite a cabinet full of meds twice a day. I’m hoping to modify the number of drugs I’m taking. I may be taking too much in the way of pain management. The effect of my pain meds is dizziness. In the mornings I can predict exactly when the dizziness will come on. It doesn’t bother me in the afternoon because meds have worn off by then. 

Throughout all of my myeloma life I try to keep a real connection with the action around me on the property. We’re getting a number of birds at the feeders. The jays are right into the suet and now we’ve got some woodpeckers, varied thrushes, and towhees coming to the feeder. Some flickers join the other birds competing for the suet. The smaller birds like the finches, pine siskins, goldfinches, and nut hatches focus on the black sunflower seeds and nyger seed in the feeders themselves. It’s sunny today and the snow is melting. Tilly, our Bernese/Shepherd cross loves this weather and makes nests in the snow on the deck. 

She spends way more time outside now than inside. She is a sweetie although I wish she wouldn’t bark quite as much as she does.