Love and Death
Having a terminal illness is a little like falling in love - with everything. When one falls for another person in that way that country singers sing about, that head-over-heels way, that truly-madly-deeply way, that object of desire gets highlighted with a yellow magic marker. You can pick them out of a crowd at a hundred yards. But getting a terminal illness highlights everything around you, the people and objects of everyday life. This morning while emptying the dishwasher, I was astounded by the beauty of our stoneware dishes and silver eating utensils. My first thought was perhaps I was manic (I'm not a manic-depressive) but then I looked again and the objects of my appreciation were truly beautiful. I knew it all the time but had gotten used to them. Thinking about never seeing them again enhanced my appreciation of my surroundings; at living a truly curated life.
My pro-democracy rants against the current political threat of authoritarianism have been replaced by trying to figure out how to stay alive. My lymphoma has returned after six years. The standard therapy looks bleak and experimental therapy hasn't happened yet. For almost forty years I have surfed the leading waves of cancer treatment. In 1979 I received high dose radiation for Hodgkin's disease. This was a new and highly successful therapy created my a large group of people but mainly Henry Kaplan at Stanford. I went to see him. He tweaked my therapeutic plan a little. I lived 34 years cancer free. In 2013 I developed a non-Hodgkin's lymphoma and received a new treatment with a new drug called Rituximab, an antibody against my tumor. Success again! Five and a half more great years. But now the lymphoma has returned and perhaps I will get the chance to catch a new wave, a really big one with a perfect shape and a perfect color, the wave of genetic engineering. On Tuesday they are scheduled to harvest my lymphocytes (a type of white cell in one's blood), send them off to a laboratory to have a new gene inserted into them using a virus, a gene that teaches my lymphocytes to kill my cancer, then send the frozen killer cells back where they will be thawed out and given back to me to grow into a living drug therapy. I would love to catch this wave. In another life surfing would be one of the first things I would learn. Catch that wave and cruise down its glossy surface hoping not to wipe out into the sand and foam of a breaking giant.
Trump doesn't seem that important to me as my children and wife, right now. I have tried to write about the current situation but lose interest. As I sit in bed writing this and look across the room at photographs of the Japanese Garden where my daughter Jennifer and I were yesterday, at the glass float my mother-in-law found on the Oregon beach, at the orchid Mary and I bought at Trader Joes on my desk, they all are imbued with a significance that asks me to appreciate them now and let go of the things I can't change. I started this blog because I had to have an outlet for the fury that the anti-democratic forces of the Republican party and hateful greed of Trump engendered in me. It still happens when I read the news, but it had faded a little because of the growing beauty all around me. I've been lucky. I hate to leave a trumpian world of racism, misogyny, nationalistic isolation and greed, to my children. I've stopped writing about these travesties because another terminal illness has changed my priorities. Love does that.
My pro-democracy rants against the current political threat of authoritarianism have been replaced by trying to figure out how to stay alive. My lymphoma has returned after six years. The standard therapy looks bleak and experimental therapy hasn't happened yet. For almost forty years I have surfed the leading waves of cancer treatment. In 1979 I received high dose radiation for Hodgkin's disease. This was a new and highly successful therapy created my a large group of people but mainly Henry Kaplan at Stanford. I went to see him. He tweaked my therapeutic plan a little. I lived 34 years cancer free. In 2013 I developed a non-Hodgkin's lymphoma and received a new treatment with a new drug called Rituximab, an antibody against my tumor. Success again! Five and a half more great years. But now the lymphoma has returned and perhaps I will get the chance to catch a new wave, a really big one with a perfect shape and a perfect color, the wave of genetic engineering. On Tuesday they are scheduled to harvest my lymphocytes (a type of white cell in one's blood), send them off to a laboratory to have a new gene inserted into them using a virus, a gene that teaches my lymphocytes to kill my cancer, then send the frozen killer cells back where they will be thawed out and given back to me to grow into a living drug therapy. I would love to catch this wave. In another life surfing would be one of the first things I would learn. Catch that wave and cruise down its glossy surface hoping not to wipe out into the sand and foam of a breaking giant.
Trump doesn't seem that important to me as my children and wife, right now. I have tried to write about the current situation but lose interest. As I sit in bed writing this and look across the room at photographs of the Japanese Garden where my daughter Jennifer and I were yesterday, at the glass float my mother-in-law found on the Oregon beach, at the orchid Mary and I bought at Trader Joes on my desk, they all are imbued with a significance that asks me to appreciate them now and let go of the things I can't change. I started this blog because I had to have an outlet for the fury that the anti-democratic forces of the Republican party and hateful greed of Trump engendered in me. It still happens when I read the news, but it had faded a little because of the growing beauty all around me. I've been lucky. I hate to leave a trumpian world of racism, misogyny, nationalistic isolation and greed, to my children. I've stopped writing about these travesties because another terminal illness has changed my priorities. Love does that.
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