Month: June 2022

#78 LIFE vs My Little Life

~ Roger JG Albert ~ 4 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.

Seizures! What else now?

~ Roger JG Albert

After at least two consultations with nurses and an oncologist, my GP has decided that I’ve probably had a couple of seizures over the past few months. Great.

Lately, after an internet conversation with one of my blog readers I wrote to them about how fully my life had become medicalized. See if you agree with me: I take a bunch of pills morning and evening to deal with cancer and pain. I go to the hospital twice a month for bloodwork and a two-hour infusion of Daratumumab. Monday we went to Nanaimo so that I could get a corticosteroid (dexamethasone) injected into my seventh cervical vertebrae to deal with the chronic pain in my neck; Tuesday morning I had an appointment with my GP for a prescription renewal, and to discuss a plan to send me to Nanaimo again, this time for an EEG if the CT scan I got Tuesday evening showed nothing. In fact, it did show nothing that could explain the two seizures I’ve had over the past few months, one very recently, so off to Nanaimo I go.

The thing is, if they find an abnormality in my brain using the EEG, they will simply want to put me on another drug, an anti-seizure drug. I’m already pickled in meds so why not another one?

My life seems to be driven by medical issues. I’m not alone in this, of course. Many of us have a close personal involvement with medicine, whether in the form of physicians, specialists, pharmaceuticals, hospitals, and various other medically-related bureaucracies like our Health Authorities in British Columbia, possibly all of the above. They should actually be called Sickness Authorities because that’s what they deal in, sickness. 

The provincial budget allocates billions of dollars for illness related issues. It’s hard to pinpoint exactly how many billions of dollars because they get spread out over several spending categories. For instance, the Ministry of Health is projected to spend approximately $25.5 billion in 2022-23 of an estimated $71 billion in total budgetary expenses. There’s another approximately $8.6 billion for infrastructure related to health. I assume the new Dementia Village in Comox falls under this category. Aging and dementia are health issues, apparently.

So, tons of money is spent every year on health issues. I account for some of that, I certainly do. The Daratumumab I get by infusion every month costs a reputed $10,000 a pop. Now that’s a big investment in my being. I’m not sure it’s justified, but it happens because of an overarching ethic dominated by the fear of death and the perceived sanctity of life. As Ernest Becker points out in Escape From Evil, the twin pillars of evil for us humans are death and disease. We do everything we can to fight them. Obviously we fail completely in dealing with death, and fighting disease is often a losing battle too. So, what are we doing? What’s the point? What if we had no ‘industrial’ medicine? Humans lived on this planet for millions of years without doctors, hospitals, and pharmaceutics? Why do we spend so much on them now? 

I can safely conclude that part of the motivation for spending such inordinate amounts of money on ‘health’ is to keep the workforce working and reliable day after day, week after week, year after year. Industry requires consistent effort from the workforce, especially from those workers with technical or managerial skills. Another motivation is the transfer of power from workers to managers, in the case of health, from us ordinary folk to the specialist professionals, doctors. 

Since the 19th Century and the advent of scientific management, the control of commodity production has fallen on the managerial class. Workers have been stripped of all control over the productive process. In the case of health, doctors are the managers of our health. We negotiate with them to some extent, we even oppose them at times, but by and large they are in control. I must say though, that that situation is changing and your ordinary GP is becoming more and more a worker for a large bureaucratic organization that controls multiple clinics. Some American hospitals, for instance, extend their control over health spending and profits by buying out or establishing clinics where doctors are employees like any other. 

Obviously we live in a capitalist world where possessive individualism rules, where business is allowed to create products and services that may or may not be conducive to healthy bodies and minds. The fast food business is clearly not interested in our health. Money is the name of the game. Any deleterious consequences for our wellbeing caused by eating too much fast food is addressed by public spending on hospitals, doctors, pharmaceuticals, et cetera. Pharmaceutical businesses might initially be organized with an eye to alleviating human suffering and enhancing wellbeing, but it seems that they soon fall in line with all capitalist ventures in the need for profit above all other values. They depend on illness for their profits. I don’t think that’s such a good thing.

Then I got to thinking. I remember when I was a grad student reading a book by Michel Foucault* called The Birth of the Clinic: An Archaeology of Medical Perception. It was written in the early 1970s. The translation into English from the French (Naissance de la Clinique) has a 1973 Copyright date. Foucault was a prominent critic of institutionalized criminal incarceration, the medical clinic, madness, and sexuality, among other topics. He was a very controversial figure in French academia for decades, and a very prolific writer. He’s a ponderous writer to some, but an elegant exegesist to others. I find his critiques compelling in some ways, but belaboured in others. In other words, he’s complicated.** 

In his book on the rise of the medical clinic, his major point is that the medical ‘gaze’, the creation of a specialized, comprehensive, and institutionalized consideration of disease and pathology would become the exclusive domain of the medical clinic. We’ve even been convinced that pregnancy and aging fit nicely under the medical gaze. Other commentators on the power of modern medicine such as Ivan Illich emphasized the class basis of control over human health whereby we become supplicants in our relationships with doctors, whereas Foucault and his followers see the medical/health landscape as a set of power relations that work to “reproduce medical dominance” (Lupton, page 88). 

Because we are so freaked out about death and disease, Foucault would argue, we negotiate our necessarily subordinate relations with our doctors on an ongoing basis. According to Lupton, there is collusion between doctors and their patients to reproduce the system of medical dominance. That’s true in my case, certainly. Without modern medicine, I’d be dead right now.

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*The Passion of Michel Foucault (March 1, 1994), by James Miller is one of the best biographies I’ve ever read. It’s balanced, decisive, and comprehensive. Definitely worth a read. Come to think of it, I need to read it again. 

**See Deborah Lupton, Foucault and the Medicalization Critique, Chapter 5 in Foucault, Health, and Medicine, Edited by Alan Peterson and Robin Bunton, 1997, Routledge: London and New York. 

Sorting Things Out

~ Roger JG Albert

The gnawing fatigue and peripheral neuropathy I experience every day from myeloma, chemotherapy and B12 deficiency I can understand. Other symptoms are less understandable and less tractable. Some of them are ongoing, some temporary.

So, today I’m telling you a story of a particularly nasty experience I had this past weekend that defies classification and that has stumped my oncologists. That may be because it isn’t related to myeloma. I don’t know. That it turned out to be temporary I consider to be a good thing, but I have no real justification for feeling that way. I won’t describe in graphic detail everything I experienced. That’s not necessary, but I will give you the gist of what I experienced so that you understand the context, that is, what I think led up to this weirdness, and its aftermath, which is still with me.

Last Thursday I went to the hospital for my monthly infusion of Daratumumab. On that day I also took dexamethasone, Benadryl, lenalidomide, aspirin, and hydromorphone (HM), that is, my usual cocktail of meds. I also took some Senokot, to counteract the constipation that invariably accompanies taking HM. I’ll also take Dulcolax if I need it as things go on.

On Friday, the dex left me with the usual spurt of energy meaning that sleep does not come easily. I got up on Friday morning having had virtually no sleep after 2 AM, but the dex was still doing its thing. We had been invited by friends to their place for a get-together before dinner, around 5:30 PM. It was so good to be out visiting friends, but it was still fairly cold out and after a couple of hours I decided it was a good idea to get back home. I was chilled more than I thought. I climbed into bed almost immediately and covered myself with lots of blankets and quilts. My legs, however, were pretty sore. I’m used to my legs being sore, but this time they were inordinately so, and the soreness was accompanied by weakness, spasms, and tingling. The tingling is usually restricted to my feet and hands, but now my legs were also involved.

I took some extra HM shortly after going to bed (2 mg). It’s called breakthrough HM because it’s used as a supplement to the 3 mg slow release HM I take in the morning and the evening. The slow release just wasn’t doing it for me, and that’s expected to happen now and again; that’s why I was prescribed 2mg of HM to take if and when the pain gets too much. I still struggled with leg and back pain so a couple of hours later I took another breakthrough HM. At about 3 AM I took another HM. I tried to sleep without much luck.

Eventually, I tried to get up to pee. That’s when I realized that I had barely any control over my muscles, all of them! As I tried to get up I slowly slipped off my bed, which is pretty high off the ground, and found myself lying on the floor, essentially paralyzed. I didn’t fall off the bed, I slid off of it. My arms were useless and so were my legs. It’s not that I couldn’t feel them, I just couldn’t move them. Carolyn came to help me, but I’m a heavy guy and she’s light but strong. Finally, with the little help I could give her, she was able to pull me into the middle of the room. Then, she maneuvered an arm chair close to me and I was able, with a lot of her help, to pull myself into the chair. We were able, then, to get the chair close to the bed. I lurched back into bed and stayed there for virtually the whole day. I’m still feeling the effects of that episode of weird symptoms.

From my consultations with the docs, it doesn’t seem like my temporary ‘paralysis’ has anything to do with myeloma. They’re flummoxed. So, off I go to get a CT scan of my head to see if my brain is still in there. 😉

I’m posting this because I really want to know if I’m the only person who has ever experienced such a thing. That means that I’d very much appreciate it if you could let me know if you’ve ever had this experience or know of someone else who has. You can PM me on Facebook, or DM me on Twitter. Or, you can email me at rogalb@shaw.ca.

Damn, it’s dark, cold, and wet out there!

Sleepless Nights, Rain Showers and Owls

~ Roger JG Albert ~ 2 Comments

It’s 8:30 in the morning but I’ve been awake and up sporadically since 2 AM. That’s a typical scenario for me the day after my chemotherapy session at the hospital on Thursday mornings. It’s the dexamethasone (a corticosteroid) that keeps me awake. The other meds just make me feel ill generally.

Being awake at 2 AM until 7 or so when Carolyn gets up has its perks. The rain showers were amazing last night. The rain just pounds on the steel roof above the bedroom and the harder it rains the more intense the sound becomes. The first one started at around 3 AM but only lasted for twenty minutes or so. The one at 4 AM was much more intense and lasted much longer. The rain will be steady today, and probably tomorrow and the day after. The Weather Network predicts that we might just see the sun again by Tuesday. We’ll see about that.

At around 4:20, just before sunrise, I heard a great horned owl shouting its call at the back of the property. The owls like to perch in the tall conifers at the back of the property and in the forest behind our back fence. They usually sound off earlier in the year as the mating season gets into full swing. This owl may just have been a little late getting itself going, like many plants in the yard. The wisteria is just starting to sprout and the honey-locust is still yawning its opposition to getting up and at it. The ferns, though, are as happy as pigs in a wallow. They like the cooler, rainy weather and they show it.

So, at 2 AM, wide awake, what could I do? Well, I could just lay there and stew, or I could pick up my Kindle and start reading. Of course, as soon as I start reading, the cat decides it’s time for me to pay attention to her so she walks right in front of my face, sticks her tail up my nose and generally makes a pest of herself. Notwithstanding the feline interruptions I often read novels that are on the humorous side from authors like Thomas King, Kurt Vonnegut and Christopher Moore. But I also read a range of books on ‘more serious’ topics like sex, misogyny and patriarchy.

Last night I continued reading a book I picked up recently by David Friedman entitled A Mind of Its Own: A Cultural History of the Penis (2001) that had been referenced in another book I just finished on a related topic: Sex at Dawn: How We Mate, Why We Stray, and What It Means for Modern Relationships by Christopher Ryan, Cacilda Jetha (2013). Like Sex at Dawn, A Mind of Its Own: A Cultural History of the Penis is a must read if you want to understand how the social and cultural relations we’ve built around sex is so out of line with our biology. After outlining some of the most egregious sexual cultural practices in the Middle Ages in Europe around sex and later witchcraft along with a compendium of culturally weird sexual practices all over the world and since recorded history, Ryan and Jetha get into some very interesting musings on the United States and its perverse official political views and practices around sexuality, many driven by religion and the drive for power by mostly white, Protestant men of a certain age. After outlining the horrendous treatment of Black people by powerful white folk and their less wealthy followers, their base in current language, during pretty much the whole of American history starting with the arrival of slaves from Africa to work in Southern plantations, they get into some more current issues, including the appointment of Clarence Thomas to the Supreme Court. [He is a year younger than me] His appointment was very controversial for a number of reasons, the most important one being that he was (is) black. This is a long quotation, but it demonstrates clearly the issues at hand and the players that are still involved in government, including Joe Biden. It’s important to note here that Thomas had been accused by a fellow attorney Anita Hill of sexual harassment but he dodged that one. He had been nominated by George H.W. Bush. According to Wikipedia he’s widely considered the most conservative and ‘originalist’ of the Supreme Court justices. It appears that he hasn’t changed his tune at all since 1991. His views are anathema to me.

From Friedman:

“Six decades later, another black American faced a committee of white men agitated about his penis. For hours those white men listened, many of them visibly appalled, to complaints from a woman about the black man’s lewd behavior toward her, all of it, she said, unwelcome and unsolicited. They heard how he bragged about the size of his organ, comparing it to a supernaturally endowed porn star named Long Dong Silver. Now that same black man faced the same committee. Unlike Claude Neal, however, he was not dangling from a rope. Except, he said, metaphorically. “From my standpoint as a black American,” Judge Clarence Thomas told the senators considering his nomination to the United States Supreme Court, “[this] is a high-tech lynching for uppity blacks who … deign to think for themselves … and it is a message that unless you kow-tow to an old order, this is what will happen. You will be lynched, destroyed, caricatured by a committee of the U.S. Senate, rather than hung from a tree.” (from “A Mind of Its Own: A Cultural History of the Penis” by David M. Friedman, page 129 Kindle edition)

and

“The exchange between Senator Hatch and Judge Thomas about racial stereotyping ensured that no lynching would occur, high-tech or otherwise. If nothing else, the all-white members of the Senate Judiciary Committee were determined to show this was 1991, not 1891. At 10:34 P.M., on October 11, when Senator Biden recessed the hearings for the day, the verdict was clear. The nominee, so close to political extinction, had come roaring back to life. When Senator Hatch left the hearing room, he was stopped by Nina Totenberg of National Public Radio. “Senator, you just saved his ass,” she told Hatch. “No, Nina,” said the Utah Republican. “He just saved his own ass.” What both probably knew, but neither could say, was that it was another part of Thomas’s body that had really been at stake all along.” (page 139 kindle edition)

I’m about half way through Friedman’s book, but so far it’s making for compelling reading. It was clear to me back in 2010 before I retired that as I was teaching a course on Love and Sex, that women had been subject to an intense misogyny for as long as recorded history and probably for as long as our species started walking upright on the African savannah. Actually, I was aware of misogyny long before 2010 but that’s when I began a more intense focus on its deconstruction. The focus of Friedman’s book, the penis, is a literary means of shifting the conversation about sex and procreation from the biological to the cultural realm. So far, I think that he’s done an excellent job of it. His analysis of Freud’s penis envy as a metaphor for the way women have been disenfranchised and generally kept out of the highest positions of business and government is particularly good and one I hadn’t considered before, at least not in the kind of detail Friedman goes into.

More on this later…as I read the second part of Friedman’s book and tie it into other books I’ve been reading, including one by Christopher Moore.