kvetching up

 Entry 1     12:03 Author David Rieff on his mother, author and public intellectual, Susan Sontag's cancer: " But then, she, too, was surprised when the doctors in Seattle came in to tell her the bone-marrow transplant had failed and her leukemia was back. She screamed out, "But this means I'm going to die!" I will never forget that scream, or think of it without wanting to cry out myself. And yet, even that terrible morning, in a pristine room at the University of Washington Medical Center, with its incongruously beautiful view of Lake Union and Mount Rainier in the background, I remember being surprised by her surprise. I suppose I shouldn't have been. T here are those who can reconcile themselves to death and those who can't . Increasingly, I've come to think that it is one of the most important ways the world divides up. Anecdotally, after all those hours I spent in doctors' outer offices and in hospital lobbies, cafeterias and family rooms, m...

 Entry 1     9:12 a.m. "Even with the utterly lost, to whom life and death are equally jests, there are matters of which no jest can be made."     -Edgar Allen Poe, The Masque of the Red Death Last night in therapy, we talked death. We talked life. We talked cancer. We talked and we talked. Jenny cried. It was an entire session dedicated to this topic or these topics. It was not intentional or planned, but because I brought it up at the beginning of the session.  Jenny, as my last entry noted, was despondent for a time yesterday, suffering from uncontrolled pain.  She expressed her desire to stop treatment.  It's a regular occurrence, but hard for me. It isn't time to contemplate that, and I know she doesn't mean it. I also know that should or when she arrives at that point, I will support whatever decision she makes.  In the interim, I struggle with how to deal with these declarations. My tactic is to say nothing and comfort her. It isn't pe...

Entry 1          9:09 a.m. " Why he that cuts off twenty years of life  Cuts off so many years of fearing death. Grant that, and death is a benefit."     -Wm. Shakespeare Jenny's third friend with pancreatic cancer that she has made, is likely going on hospice today. She has to decide. There is one more drug that they can try with a 10% chance of working .  By working, I presume it means slow down the process of dying, because there is no cure for stage IV metastatic pancreatic cancer.  Jenny spent much of yesterday again pleading and lamenting, and ultimately denying her life is foreshortened by PDAC.  I don't think the latter is as meaningful as it once was, after the visit to the UW Liver Clinic, and after watching 3 people she befriended with the disease, each around her age, dying or rapidly heading toward the final reward.  But I am wracked with sadness, for her pain, for her fear, for the battle ahead, and for the eventu...

Entry 1.    11:54 a.m. Now, I Give My Baby, Now, The Ninety-Nine Degree First, the puppy is better.  Huge relief.  Huuuuuuge relief.  I laid with her on the floor last night, keeping the sick and lethargic puppy company, like a scared dad.  But, today, back to rambunctious and frolicking behavior.     Abby and I agreed last night we'd head over to Goodwill to buy lots of old CDs, her latest hobby--a throwback chip off the old block.  We got in my 2005 Jeep Grand Jalopy, I started the car and backed around the corner to change direction.  When I put the car back in drive, the dashboard warning light lit up like Seattle's 1st Avenue in 1985, red lights flashing everywhere.  The electronic ABS system had experienced failure. I am grateful that it didn't happen last night as I drove from my friend Paul's house down 23rd towards Montlake (after an amazingly great dinner and company, btw).  But, I am afraid its time to put the o...

Culling the Herd The woods are lovely, dark, and deep. I  I look at disease as nature's way of culling the  herd.  Bad genetics, of which I have no dearth, tend to help sort things out.  I saw yesterday that due to environmental contamination, caused by human activity, fertility rates are crashing, another genetic culling.  This isn't social darwinism, but actual natural selection (aided by our hubris and inability to stop destroying the place we live) doing its work.  Of course, poor people and therefore, generally, non-white people in the West suffer the most--since race and economics closely track. That isn't Darwinism at work, but racism, by the way. Any other answer is unsatisfactory as an explanation, and likely contains bedded racist assumptions. Enough about that. The more we try to architect around it, the more ways nature shows it's inescapability, underscores our hubris.  We build vaccines and embrace the germ theory of disease, and the worl...