Month: May 2021

The questionable quality of longevity.

~ Roger JG Albert ~ 2 Comments

Lately I’ve been reading books from the 90s. The books by Kim Stanley Robinson, especially the Mars Trilogy are, not surprisingly, set on Mars and span a period of several hundred years. It seems Robinson is not inclined to write about earthly events and characters, focussing his attention instead on Mars, her moons, and the asteroid belt that he has also transformed by technology to support human life. The book of his I’m currently reading is called Aurora and is about the travels of humankind outside the solar system for the first time. Their destination is the Tau Ceti e system some twelve light years from the Terran Solar System. It takes them many generations and 170 years to get there, a scenario packed with angst about life and death.

In an earlier work, Robinson confronts mortality straight on. He concludes about the characters in The Mars Trilogy that:

A long life is not necessarily a good life.

Their lives were long, very long indeed if they took “the treatment”. They could not yet know just how long they could live because few of them had died of causes relatable to an ordinary life, of ‘natural causes’ not that they were invincible. It’s true that most inhabitants of Mars were over two hundred years old. Two had died in an explosion, one had died by violence, another by being swept into a roaring river of ice into the depths of a swift moving glacier. In his Mars Trilogy Robinson has cleverly endowed his protagonists with very long lives. However longevity does not equal high quality and death will not be denied.

“There were all kinds of madness, evidently. Ann wandering the old world, off on her own; the rest of them staggering on in the new world like ghosts, struggling to construct one life or another. Maybe it was true what Michel said, that they could not come to grips with their longevity, that they did not know what to do with their time, did not know how to construct a life.”

from “Blue Mars (Mars Trilogy Book 3)” by Kim Stanley Robinson.

Mars colonists may not know what to do with their two hundred or more years of life. What about us? How do we decide what to do with our lives? How do we construct a life whether we have a month left to live or two hundred years?

This is really an unfair question given the vast range of possible answers along a plethora of trajectories. But it’s a question that can generate some critical thinking about our lives and how we live them. For that reason I feel justified in asking it. Still I think that narrowing the focus of the question could be valuable.

The questions that interest me the most concern our relationship with death and immortality. These are ‘intellectual’ questions that have nothing to do with the material requirements of life. Of course, no matter how we look at it, life means movement. Death implies stillness. That may be why so many of us are gripped with the need to do…something…anything. Doing justifies living. Stillness or inactivity reminds us of death.

Me at a very young age. Don’t know exactly how old.

This photo is of me at a very young age, not sure exactly how old. That said, I am not the person you see in the photo. In fact, although arguably I am the person depicted in this photo, I have very little in common with that person. I could say that in the photo you see an embryonic version of me and that may well be true. We, the little dude in the photo and I, are obviously related; we share a life trajectory. But there is not one molecule in my body now that existed in the little dude back then. And the little dude hadn’t read Marx or Darwin. According to Milan Kundera in Immortality little dude would be in the happy first stage of life. The second stage is the preeminently active stage when we realize that death is real and that it is hounding us. To fend it off we must do, build a career, a family, a community. The trajectory in this stage is characterized by growth and the morality of the time expects material production from us. I am in the third and final stage of life, or at least I can be found transitioning into the final stage, the WTF stage, I call it. It’s the stage when strength is fast being replaced by fatigue and exhaustion. Kundera writes:

“Fatigue: A silent bridge leading from the shore of life to the shore of death. At that stage death is so close that looking at it has already become boring.”1

I’m bored, but only to tears, not to death. I’m just now standing on the crest of the bridge but I can easily make out the shore of death on the horizon which is becoming clearer and more distinct every day. According to Kundera, this third stage is where freedom can be found. If I knew what freedom was I might be more eager to actively pursue it. The third stage will come or I will die in angst fussing over the quality of my life experiences and my immortality which, of course, can only exist after my death.2

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1 Kundera, Milan. 1990. Immortality. New York: Harper Perennial. page 71.

2. Kundera considers immortality as that view that encompasses an entire lifetime but is also restricted to it. It is a fixed entity that has no place except in the memories of those left behind. It is not soul based unless you can think of the soul as the totality of what we leave behind. It is not eternal life but the memory of a whole life lived. Death completes my life.

#84. One Day at a Time

~ Roger JG Albert ~ 4 Comments

Spring is a magical time for me. I never tire of looking out the windows at the many flowers, ferns, plants and trees as they come out in response to the warmth in the soil and other encouraging signs of Spring. On most days, the sun is there to warm my face. When it rains, the droplets glisten on the leaves as the hummingbirds dart back and forth between the feeder and their favourite perch. The wisteria is blossoming and will soon be in full flower, providing a shade canopy for the deck in anticipation of those lazy, hazy days of summer.

Wisteria

Occasionally I will take a slow stroll through the gardens aided by my cane and revel in the glorious, delicious scents that emanate from the many flowers that are now in full bloom. Right now the crab-apple tree with its ten or twelve foot canopy is showing off its clusters of blossoms and establishing its perfumed dominance as it spreads out next to the driveway. In the vegetable garden, without the benefit of a sweet scent, the rhubarb has already provided us with a delicious desert and promises more. The garlic is as hardy as ever this year and will supply us with all that we could possibly want for the coming year.

  • Crab-apple blossoms
  • Crab-apple tree

I seem to be feeling better as time goes by. Springtime has that effect on me. Of course, I’m 74 and I have the emperor of all maladies as well as various and sundry ailments related to my vertebrae competing to see which of them can make my life most miserable. All of them can and do contribute to the waves of pain that frequently sweep over me, and that inspire me to reach for the opiates and the acetaminophen. That said, I expect improvement in my situation in the coming weeks as I move into a new phase of chemotherapy having Daratumumab infusions once a month but staying the course with lenalidomide and dexamethasone. Of course, because of the nature of myeloma I can only think in the short term, five years tops. I have another handicap that makes my situation somewhat different than others and that’s the fact that I have only one kidney. I lost my left kidney to kidney cell cancer in 2002. The pain in my left side due to the nephrectomy (kidney removal) has not let me forget it either. My left side is a constant source of pain.

I should say that cancer has not been my only tormentor. In my youth I lost a lumbar disk to a sawmill accident leaving my lower back especially vulnerable to re-injury. Given all the physical ailments and challenges I’ve faced over my lifetime, I’ve managed to stay physically active running and cycling as well as working in my shop and studio. Now, the limitations I face are those of old age and cancer. I just have to be super vigilant and not do stupid things, things that could leave me physically incapacitated.

Back to my chemo life, I checked my numbers earlier this afternoon. That means that I consulted MyHealth, an online access to lab results, imaging, appointments, etc., to see what all the blood tests I get periodically can tell me about my state of health. I have results as of May 4th, 2021. Looking at the results you’d have to conclude that you were looking at the blood serum of a very healthy person of my age. It seems that the chemo meds that I’m on now are doing the trick, that is they are suppressing my myeloma down to levels seen in healthy individuals.

Too bad my blood serum won’t maintain that level of normality for any length of time. My myeloma is kept at bay as long as I keep taking my chemo meds. Stop taking my meds and the myeloma wants to kill, kill, kill. The amount of time between when I stop taking my meds and the resurgence of the disease can vary a lot. The last time I stopped taking my chemo meds it was only a matter of a couple of months before my myeloma was back and as active as ever.

With this new chemo regimen it looks like I may get a better result than I got last time. It also looks like I’ll have a long-term relationship with some of my chemo meds. I’m not sure which ones at the moment.

The way these things work, chemo meds only work for a certain length of time after which a new cocktail of chemo meds needs to replace the meds that are no longer working. It looks like the Daratumumab/lenalidomide/dexamethasone triumvirate is going to give me a longer period of remission than I had the last time I went off chemo meds. I’m hoping for years of remission but that’s yet to be determined. If I could get a modicum of mobility as well as ability to use shop tools and studio materials even for a few months I’d be happy. So far my Dara/Lena/Dex trio is doing the trick. I hope it continues that way and buys me some more time.

All I can do is take it one day at a time.

Be a Blogger They Said!

~ Roger JG Albert ~ 4 Comments

I don’t know how many times I sat down with my computer with the intention of writing this blog post. It’s frustrating no end. I write a few words then my brain just clams up not even allowing a single word license to start a sentence.

I guess after over five hundred blog posts, I can legitimately call myself a blogger. However, right now I’m feeling that my blogging mojo is taking a bit of a vacation. The last time I wrote anything on this blog was on April 11th, 2021. It was always my objective to produce a blog post a week. I was particularly successful in that after my myeloma diagnosis in October, 2019. Lately my resolve has been ground down by the utter tedium of my biweekly Daratumumab infusions and the overwhelming fatigue that are side effects of chemo meds. I can blame my chemo meds for my lack of productivity. I think that’s legitimate. But it’s frustrating none the less. Well, I can’t write worth a damn but I can sleep, that’s for sure.

Sleep! Wow, do I ever get a lot of sleep. It’s not unusual for me to sleep for 12 hours, say from 8 PM until 7 AM. Moreover, I’ll often nap sitting in my chair or even crash in bed for an hour or two during the day. Take today for example. I slept soundly last night with just one pee stop, then woke up again around six o’clock needing to pee I thought but no, I didn’t pee. I went right back to sleep and woke up at 8:28, two minutes before my med alarm. I usually get up by 7:30 at the latest, but not this morning. I actually woke up with a start, confused by the dream I had just had, a dream with my bedroom appearing as a recurring elements.

Over the past few days I’ve dreamt every night, and I’ve been able to recall my dreams. They always start with me in bed in the bedroom, confused by the room, where it is, and how to get out of it. I didn’t have a weird dream last night, but the night before, I dreamed that I woke up but it was so dark, I had no idea where I was. So, what to do? Slowly I got out of bed feeling around for a wall. I felt around tentatively for some time before I touched a wall and started off to the right feeling for something, anything familiar. I found nothing for some time then I felt what could have been the closet doors. I’d gone too far! So I backed down the wall feeling carefully for the door. Finally I found the door and opened it! And found myself just outside the bedroom by the washroom. That’s when I woke up, I think. On another night I dreamed that I was sleeping in the bedroom but that I had to wake up to go pee. This time I found the door easily enough, went out to have a pee, then leaving the bathroom I quickly realized that I was not in our house and that this place was totally unfamiliar to me. I immediately thought “Alice in Wonderland.” And that was about it just as I woke up, thankfully in my own bed and in my own bedroom.

The thing is that in these recurring dreams over the past week or so, I always woke up feeling trapped in a sense, at least trapped in the sense that I couldn’t find a way out of the bedroom, or if I found my way out of the bedroom, it wasn’t always in a familiar place.

Of course I immediately tried a little self diagnosis. The feeling of being trapped or unable to find a familiar place I felt might be analogous to the way I feel sometimes about my cancer. It’s a dark place with nothing familiar about it. Carolyn came to that conclusion too as she observed me going in and out of the hospital, taking chemo meds and being exhausted all the time. She psychoanalyzed me and came to these conclusions maybe even before I did!

The cancer I have is obviously unfamiliar ground, but it’s just a preliminary to death and dying. Even in my waking life I feel trapped by my cancer. There’s no way out of it. Or rather there’s just one way out of it because it is incurable. The way I see it, when I die I fall into a box with no past, no present, and no future. It’s a place, really, where even I don’t exist. I is a character that is only relevant in life and has no reality in death. Dying, then, is a process of the I fading away into nothingness.

This is enough for today. I’ve been sweating buckets just getting these few words out. I’ll try to get another post out in a week. I hope that by then I don’t still have a plug in the part of my brain that writes!