Month: October 2021

Slowly Falling Apart

~ Roger JG Albert

For this post, I decided to create a collage of quotes and commentaries from books I’ve been reading lately. They range from comments on death and dying to philosophy, culture, and the future. So far in this blog, I’ve refrained from commenting on American Congressional politics, but I just may go there soon. I told my sociology students year after year throughout my college teaching career that the American empire would fall, as all empires fall, not from external conquest but from implosion due to unresolved, long standing conflict. The American empire, specifically, will fall because of commodity production that depends on longer and more complex supply chains and failing profits. America is falling on its own sword of profits. Supply chains and economic processing zones in a plethora of ‘developing’ parts of the world have been an issue for decades while only recently making it onto mainstream media commentary and news. I’ll explain in a future post.

US politics has to wait. It’s a mess down there but it’s a mess everywhere on the planet at the moment. Let’s move on.

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Robert Sapolsky is one of my all-time favourite guys. He has a number of his Stanford University lectures on YouTube. He’s a neuroscientist who specializes in stress. He worked in the field for many years with Olive baboons in Africa. I have a video in which his work with the baboons is featured. On the topic of the human condition he writes:

“we are now living well enough and long enough to slowly fall apart. The diseases that plague us now are ones of slow accumulation of damage—heart disease, cancer, cerebrovascular disorders.” (from “Why Zebras Don’t Get Ulcers: The Acclaimed Guide to Stress, Stress-Related Diseases, and Coping (Third Edition)” by Robert M. Sapolsky)

Now, ain’t that the truth! If you check out Stats Canada’s vital statistics you’ll find out that cancer is the leading cause of death in Canada. Actually, life is the leading cause of death everywhere, but as far as the observable evidence of bodily decay and death goes, cancer is determined to be the immediate major causes. Writing this makes me want to go back and binge watch Sapolsky on YouTube. Not only does he have a lot to say, but he says it in such an engaging way that binge watching is entirely feasible. I’ll be sharing more from Sapolsky later, but now on to another very different writer.

This is a quote from another book I’m reading that I want to share with you. Talk about falling apart! Robinson is a contemporary novelist writing in the sci-fi genre with dystopian tinges. He writes:

“Say the order of your time feels unjust and unsustainable and yet massively entrenched, but also falling apart before your eyes. The obvious contradictions in this list might yet still describe the feeling of your time quite accurately, if we are not mistaken. Or put it this way; it feels that way to us. But a little contemplation of history will reveal that this feeling too will not last for long. Unless of course the feeling of things falling apart is itself massively entrenched, to the point of being the eternal or eternally recurrent individual human’s reaction to history. Which may just mean the reinscription of the biological onto the historical, for we are all definitely always falling apart, and not massively entrenched in anything at all. 31 India” (from “The Ministry for the Future: A Novel” by Kim Stanley Robinson)

Most of this quote will be difficult for you to fathom because it’s out of context. It’s the last sentence that really matters. To help you out a little with the context of this quote, the ‘order of your time’, in the first sentence means that in the course of your life you feel out of control. You can’t go back, you can’t stay still. You can only go forward towards your death. This applies not only to us as biological entities but also to our cultural and social constructs which also are bound to come and go in a generally disorderly way. We cannot be ‘massively entrenched’ in life because daily existence makes a lie of any attempt to avoid moving toward death.

Now, more from Robinson in another of his sci-fi novels set far from Earth on a ship and a moon.

“Existential nausea comes from feeling trapped. It is an affect state resulting from the feeling that the future has only bad options. Of course every human faces the fact of individual death, and therefore existential nausea must be to a certain extent a universal experience, and something that must be dealt with by one mental strategy or another. Most people appear to learn to ignore it, as if it were some low chronic pain that has to be endured. Here in this meeting, it began to become clear, for many of those present, that extinction lay at the end of all their possible paths. This was not the same as individual death, but was instead something both more abstract and more profound.” (from “Aurora” by Kim Stanley Robinson)

Robinson is not a great writer in terms of composition, but he is a very perceptive commentator on the human condition. His novels are all about the fragility of humanity in the face of evolution and death, both on an individual and social level. Death denial is a consistent theme in human history and as a goal, has engendered a mass of immortality tales with “supernatural” characters as diverse as Zeus, Jesus, Shiva and a mess of lesser gods. These characters are our heroes who will save us from death if only we believe in them. But then we come face to face with evolution and biology which care not a wit whether we believe in them or not, and which just carry on.

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So, what about falling apart?

It’s clear that average death rates have risen consistently over the decades on the planet although in the US they’ve been falling for some demographics. Falling or not, on average we live well into our seventies. In fact, Stats Can tells me that if I live to be seventy-four I can expect to live another fourteen years. These are average life expectancies, of course. Millenia ago, living to thirty-seven years of age was considered average. People died of things then we seldom die of these days (such as appendicitis).

Sapolsky understands that the longer we live the more things can go wrong in our bodies. That’s self-evident the longer we live. If we get injured while young we can expect to heal and then just get on with things. As we (I) get older the healing process slows down.

There are a few very fortunate people, especially in the world’s richest parts, who suffer very little as they get old. I don’t think I know any of those people (well, maybe one or two). That said, there is an inevitable decline in capacity as we age. That doesn’t mean we should stop living and simply prepare for death because we know it’s going to happen. For me, I have much reduced capacity. At seventy-four I have maybe a quarter of the capacity I had at fifty. But a quarter is better than nothing. I still have shit to do! I’m falling apart, yes. In fact, I can’t fall much farther, but that’s fine, I still have a way to go.

Dexamethasone, Tooth-aches, Pig Kidneys, and Life.

~ Roger JG Albert

So, dexamethasone strikes again! I went to the hospital this past Thursday for my monthly infusion of the monoclonal antibody, Daratumumab. Along with the Dara, I get a number of other chemo meds among them dexamethasone. I only get fifteen milligrams of dex these days once a month and that’s probably a good thing because any steroid can be trouble in the long run. Of course my long run is getting palpably shorter, or to put it another way, dex can’t really hurt me in the long run if I don’t have much of a long run. What I can say, though, is that no matter how long my long run is, I’ll make the best of it. I’ve decided that that’s my goal. I’m thinking of my life now as a one mile marathon race. Getting closer to the finish line is no reason to slow up. In fact, it’s all the more reason to step up the effort. Of course, the closer to the finish line we get, the more tired we get so it’s a trade-off. Still, pushing to the end is my goal. But I digress.

What is interesting about dex is it’s effect on my tooth-ache. I mentioned before that I had a nasty tooth-ache that a dex shot in my neck attenuated rapidly and almost eliminated entirely. Well, that tooth-ache has persisted in a low rumble since it returned after a few days following my neck shot. Again, the dex that I took orally on Thursday killed the pain in my tooth right dead. It’s back now because as I’ve become well aware, the relief from dex is very short lived. Oh, I appreciate the pain relief whichever way I can get it, but dex has other side effects that aren’t as welcome as the pain relief. Check out this list of side effects. I’ve experienced many of them over the past couple of years.

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[As an aside, I’m writing this sitting in my new La-Z-Boy recliner (thanks to my very generous daughters) in my cozy, warm living room. Carolyn, my love of forty-eight years, while I sit warm and cozy in the living room, is out there walking on the trails in Cumberland in rain as thick as soup. She is accompanied by Tilly, our Bernese Mountain Dog/German Shepherd mix who loves her mom and also most other living things, and swimming too. I hope she gets home soon so we can have a cup of tea together. She did!]

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So, what about pig kidneys? Well, lots. This article explains what the experiment was all about. And it was an experiment, of course. Serious ethical issues aside, the experiment was a success. Researchers in New York attached a kidney from a specially raised pig, one that was genetically modified to not produce a certain sugar that caused immediate rejection in humans, to a cadaver. Yes, a cadaver. The objective was to see whether or not the pig kidney could reproduce the function of a normal human kidney, and apparently it did, and splendidly so. The cadaver was special too, of course. I suggest you read the article to get the story from a reputable source.

What’s the big deal, I ask? Researchers genetically modify pigs so that we humans can use their organs. How does that make you feel? The truth is that pig heart valves have been successfully implanted in humans for some time now and researchers have been experimenting with xenotransplantation since the 17th Century. We eat pigs all the time. They are one of our major sources of food. They are also intelligent, rivalling some humans I surmise.

The reason pigs are such a good fit for xenotransplantation is that they are so closely related to us genetically. In fact, we are related to all other living things, animal and plant but with varying degrees of fit in terms of the quantity of genes that we share with them. We are very closely related to chimpanzees sharing something like 99% of DNA with them. (I think that the reason we don’t raise chimps to eat is that they look too much like us.) We share DNA with ducks and cedar trees, snails, and puppy dogs.

From what I can gather from casual observation, we tend to think of all species as distinct from each other and, of course, that’s partially true. Sadly, we are generally ignorant of our place in the scheme of life on this planet. We have been convinced over millennia that we are special under the sun and that all life on the planet is there to serve us. That attitude will ultimately lead to our demise as we Bolsonaro the Amazon rain forest, empty the seas of fish and other life, and generally bulldoze our way through all life on the planet. We take up more and more of the biosphere every year. We, as a species, have no respect for life and from what I can see, have very few mechanisms that would allow us to gain respect for life. Our culture is designed to deny death and thus to ignore life.

Our political systems are geared to produce maximal growth and compete in absurd ways for greater and greater shares of planetary resources. It’s disconcerting to see China and the US embroiled in a chest-thumping match over Taiwan. How stupid. How short-sighted. How ignorant. What are they going to do, lob nuclear weapons at each other? It’s especially ridiculous knowing how closely tied manufacturing in the US is tied to production in China. It’s hard to see how Americans destroying American production in China will help anyone, anywhere. I suspect that the Chinese leadership is in need of a diversion to keep its population’s collective mind off of serious domestic problems. Focussing attention outward is a tried and true method of avoiding domestic conflict.

I could argue that the way we are increasingly economically interdependent through production of commodities in networks that span the globe is encouraging as a basis for concerted action. However, I’m not sure that we have the time to wait for economic interdependence to lead to political interdependence. Finally, I’m not convinced that as a species we are capable of doing what needs to be done to enable us to live in harmony with the rest of life on the planet. It may be that cockroaches will inherit the earth and if that’s the case, so be it.

I want my goddamned life back! Redux

~ Roger JG Albert ~ 2 Comments

[I wrote the post below in April, 2021. I’m still feeling it and still living with the issues I raised in this post in April! I think it’s worth a repost. Life is infinite, but any expression of life is finite. As expressions of life, some of us are more inclined to accept our finality, our death, than others. In April I was particularly pissed off about my lack of resilience and strength. I guess that my attitude in this regard has changed somewhat. I’m more inclined now to just accept my limitations and to accept death as the only inevitable consequence of life, and maybe have a little fun while waiting for it. I will die soon enough. This can’t go on forever! I’ve always understood death from a philosophical and anthropological perspective. Now things are getting more real every day. It’s a bit scary, but it’s not something I turn away from. Of course, I may feel differently about all of this if you ask me about it next week! So, don’t ask me.

On another topic entirely, I’m concerned about this blog. I’m getting tapped out as far as writing about my life, its trials and tribulations. I do have a lot of things to write about but they are less personal and more sociological than the content of most of my current posts. After all, I am still a sociologist. Early on in this blog, in 2013, I wrote extensively about Ernest Becker and his books, The Denial of Death and Escape From Evil. I still consider these books to be critical as they confront the issues of the many cultural ways we try to deny death, like misogyny. I’m still amazed at misogyny and its close relative, patriarchy. I may write soon about religious denials of death as expressed in Sunday rituals and the overwhelming need many of us feel to transcend the physical beings that we are, a need fulfilled by religion. I will write too about the recent implantation of a pig’s kidney into a human. Just think about the philosophical and sociological implications of that as you eat your bacon for breakfast!

Ciao for now! Read on…]

I may want it back, but of course I can’t have it back. I can never have it back at least not the way I lived it when I was fifty years old. We can’t live backwards on this planet. It’s just not possible to go back in time. Furthermore we can’t achieve the physical vigour at seventy that we had a forty. Cognitive vigour is another thing entirely, but I find that since my retirement, I’m just not as sharp as I used to be. Writing this blog helps me keep my cognitive skills in some state of repair, but it’s harder all the time to maintain a certain level of critical skill when the couch beckons. It’s perfectly okay to be lazy in old age although lazy has a moral connotation that doesn’t apply to inactivity in old age. Strangely enough, there is an expectation in our culture that the aged should be occupied at productive activity even in old age, or we should at least go golfing and volunteer at the local SPCA. I was caught up in this moral silliness for a while, but cancer soon disabused me of any expectation that I could stay active in old age. My mobility is highly compromised and was even before my cancer diagnosis. But that’s okay. I had my time being physically active and strong. Our lives are made up of stages. I’m on the last stage.

Every now and then I forget how old I am and the fact that I have cancer, arthritis, and degenerative disk syndrome. In this forgetful state I try to do things that I did easily when I was 30, 40, 50, or 60, even 65. For instance, today I got it into my head that I could still chop wood. Silly man. It was just one piece. I thought there would be no harm in that but Carolyn reminded me that I would pay for my silliness later, maybe tonight. The thing is that one of my chemo meds is a steroid called dexamethasone. I take it just before I go to the hospital for my Daratumumab infusion. It reduces pain and increases stamina. It also gives me the shakes and a false sense of capacity. That’s when I think I’m still physically capable of doing things like working in my shop or cutting woodblocks for printing. [I haven’t given up yet, damn it.]

So, that’s it. We all know that human life is finite. We speak as though we understand and accept that. But you know what? There is a ton of research that establishes beyond a doubt that we generally do not accept the finality of death. I’ve written about the denial of death over and over again for decades. But you don’t have to count on me for information and confirmation. Just consult the bible in your hotel room. Or just go to the religion section in your local library, although I’m reading a novel at the moment that deals with death avoidance in quite a non-religious, creative way. The novel (the last of three in a trilogy) is set on Mars sometime in the future. It’s called Blue Mars which follows Green Mars and Red Mars. About half way through the book one of the lead characters, Nirgal, who was born on Mars, takes a trip to Earth (Terra) and almost dies. To understand the quote below it’s important to know that Martian scientists had developed a longevity program that allowed people to live much longer than they would normally have. People would have to have this procedure involving stem cells and telomeres repeated at intervals. Some of the characters were a hundred and fifty years old and more.

“But Nirgal had seen Simon die even though Simon’s bones had been stuffed with Nirgal’s young marrow. He had felt his body unravel, felt the pain in his lungs, in every cell of him. He knew death was real. Immortality had not come to them, and never would. Delayed senescence, Sax called it. Delayed senescence, that was all it was; Nirgal knew that. And people saw that knowledge in him, and recoiled. He was unclean, and they looked away. It made him angry.”

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

So, even in this scientific, atheistic world, people longed for a longer, productive, and meaningful life and a painless senescence followed by immortality yet as Nirgal points out, ‘delayed senescence’ is all that people could hope for. Even if they lived to be a thousand years old, their lives were still finite, albeit much longer than what one could expect without the longevity treatment. As the quote highlights, people sensed that Nirgal knew about mortality and shunned him for it.

I understand senescence because that’s what I’m living now. It is not delayed for me. Chemotherapy is nothing more than a longevity treatment. As we undertake chemotherapy we expect to live longer (see my next blog post) but, as I’ve learned, the price of chemo for me is reduced capacity although that’s not true for everyone and for every kind of chemotherapy.

Dexamethasone for the Win!

~ Roger JG Albert ~ 4 Comments

Last post I more or less said that I would not write about pain anymore. Well, that’s not really practical if I want to write about my life so that idea is out the window. Lately pain has been my life. It’s dominated everything that I do and don’t do (because of it). So, away we go.

Along with the general pain in my legs and back from the chemo treatments I get, I have serious neck issues that are fairly common in older people, that is, vertebrae that collapse or the passages in the spine shrink (stenosis). For all of you young’uns out there, this is your future. However, most people don’t have pain to accompany these age-related changes. I just happen to be one of the lucky ones to get excruciating pain in my neck that includes cramps and a low-grade throbbing pain. Most of this I can handle. The cramps require immediate attention much like a charley-horse in the leg muscles. I often wear a neck brace to keep my neck from moving too much and inducing the cramps. In fact, I’ve just put one on because looking down on my keyboard is a sure way of bringing on a cramp.

I’ve been exasperated with my neck pain because it severely limits my mobility and I want to do some painting, drawing, and boat work. As soon as I look down for any length of time, I get a cramp and that really cramps my style, if you know what I mean. So, I called my GP. He, I’m sure being sick and tired of me complaining about pain referred me to the Pain Clinic at the hospital in Nanaimo. They called me from the clinic surprisingly quickly and we set up a telephone appointment with Dr. Pariser, one of the doctors who works at the clinic. We decided on a procedure. It would take place on October 6th, yesterday. All that was left was the waiting.

Carolyn drove me down to Nanaimo yesterday morning when I got to see Dr. Pariser. We decided on a treatment that’s been around for a long time and that works fifty percent of the time and only after a month following the procedure. It (the procedure) involves injecting a steroid in the spinal cord to deaden the pain. It’s clinically referred to as an epidural. Epidurals are sometimes given to women during labour but they are not uncommon for lower back pain.

In my case the steroid was dexamethasone. I’ve often mentioned dexamethasone (dex) in my previous posts because it’s a staple medication of my chemotherapy and it has interesting side effects. I was a bit surprised when Dr. Pariser told me that he would be injecting dex into my neck, but he assured me that there would be no adverse effects from adding this dosage of dex into my mix along with my monthly oral 12 milligrams taken in conjunction with my infusion of Daratumumab at the hospital. Frankly, I didn’t know what to expect in terms of side effects from the dex injection in my neck. It didn’t take long to find out.

Before I tell you about the effects of the dex injection in my neck I want to tell you about another source of pain I’ve had recently that prompted a visit to my dentist. It started innocently enough with a bit of sensitivity in an upper left molar. It has a large crown which has been there for some twenty-five years. X-rays showed a probable need for a root canal. Well, that was fine and dandy, but when could that be scheduled. I was in pain NOW. My dentist was very concerned and referred me to a group of dental specialists in the Valley that specializes in this kind of work. Great. Their office called me and cheerfully informed me that I was booked for an appointment on November 15th. Yahoo! That’s all I needed: a six week wait for a consultation, never mind the procedure. After whining for a bit I got the appointment moved up to October 15th. That was some improvement but still a long way off given the level of pain I was in. I mean, this pain trumped all other pain in my body. It was excruciating, it was relentless.

So, yesterday when we drove to Nanaimo I was still in a lot of pain, but it had attenuated some due to an onslaught of hydromorphone. I take hydromorphone daily in a small dose for pain associated with my multiple myeloma, its side effects and the side effects from the chemo. I take a slow-release dosage morning and night, but I also have a stock of what’s called breakthrough medication for times when the slow-release dosage just doesn’t cut it anymore. Over the last while I used a lot of breakthrough hydromorphone. It has a lot of side effects that I don’t particularly enjoy, like insomnia, but too bad about that. I needed pain relief and damn the torpedos! It’s a good thing I had my breakthrough hydromorphone.

This is where serendipity comes in. I love serendipity. Dex can relieve pain. I had pain in my mouth as well as my neck so what would dex do for my molar pain? Well, I’m pleased to report that the dex pretty much killed the pain in my mouth, at least for now. I don’t expect the pain relief to last a long time, but any relief is welcome. I have the hiccups, a common dex side effect so I know it’s working. Strangely enough, I slept very well last night. Insomnia is also a common side effect, but it’s also a side effect of other meds I’m taking so who knows what’s going on in my body.

As a bit of a side note, if there are scientists reading this, scientists interested in pain and its management, you might want to think about a way of letting others know how much pain we’re in. That wouldn’t have any pain relief effects, but it may increase positively the way most people react to people with chronic pain. I mean, it’s hard to know if someone is in pain or not. People can fake it. There are clues in bodily function and blood work, but not many that show physically. Arthritis can sometimes show clearly in the body. In the last decade of his life, my father’s hands became deformed with arthritis. He was unable to open them, and he kept them clutched against his chest. Maybe, if our pain wasn’t obvious, if our limbs glowed blue or green that would be a clear indication of pain. Whatever. Work on it.

So, in summary, dex was a clear winner for me yesterday and today. I still had a shake (liquid diet) for breakfast today like yesterday rather than my usual granola or toast, but I’ll carry on with that because I really like the shakes Carolyn makes! Besides, I expect my toothache to reappear as the dex wears off. So be it. Pain management is very complex because the pain never stays the same in terms of source or intensity. It’s like playing whack-a-mole, but with no fun involved.